Volume 21, Issue 2

This paper analyzes the Latin subordinate conjunctions quia and quoniam in Plautus’ comedies. Previous studies have shown that quia and quoniam play an important role in managing the information flow of a discourse. Clauses introduced by quia typically contain information that is new to the addressee, while quoniam -clauses tend to present information that belongs to the speech participants’ common ground. Our analysis shows that in Plautus, quia and quoniam each appear in specific communicative contexts that reflect their information management properties. We also demonstrate how Plautus exploits these characteristics of quia and quoniam to manipulate the information flow on stage for the purpose of audience entertainment.

I took into account an Ammianus passage, namely 20,8,3–4, where the text edited by all modern scholars has been marked with two crosses to show that the text is not sure. As a matter of fact in every modern edition we read: [ Iulianus ] quamquam non † repugnanter, tamen nec adrogantibus uerbis, quicquam scripsit, ne uideretur subito † repugnasse . Here the adverb tamen causes problems, because the reader expects to find quamquam non repugnanter, nec adrogantibus uerbis, quicquam scripsit without tamen . A solution is to place tamen after uerbis as Pighi and Seyfarth did to substitute quamquam non repugnanter, tamen nec adrogantibus uerbis, quicquam scripsit with quamquam non repugnanter, nec adrogantibus uerbis, tamen quicquam scripsit . But such a solution is too arbitrary. Another solution was proposed by Petschening, i.e. to replace non repugnanter with non repurganter . But the difference between non repugnanter and non repurganter was too reduced and a similar difficulty occurred also with repurganter . However, I considered more attentive the reading of the manuscript Fuldensis, the father of all manuscripts which transmitted Ammianus’ text, and found that the word tamen , which caused the problem, did not exist and was produced by modern editors from the following reading: repugnant certant V m1 repugnanter tamen m2 ( V = Fuldensis). Here certant seems to have been introduced in order to explain the infrequent word repugnanter : repugnant certant of the first hand of V . The word certant was a gloss, and the reading of the second hand of V was produced by dividing and eliminating certant , the gloss, in this way: repugnan terr̭ tanῑ , where cer ( of cer tant ) was read ter , considering the great similarity of c and t in Carolingian script, and added to repugnant /. This produced repugnanter and what remained of certant ( cer tant ) was read tam which for its part was considered an abbreviation of tamen . On the other hand, I found in Ammianus some other examples of this behaviour employed by the librari, e.g. 22,8,29 Sauromatae, per quos amnes fluunt perpetui // Clark Rolfe Selem Seyfarth Fontaine Viansino per quosdam esfluit V m1 per quosđ/ amnes fluunt V m3. In this case quosđ/ am and the letter n added over and es from es fluunt has produced amnes , with the letter d deleted and another n placed over, thus arriving finally at the expression: per quos (i.e. Sarmatas ) amnes fluunt perpetui: per quosđ am n es fluu n t per petui V m3. A clear example how the librari of V worked.

Events are prototypically expressed by verbs, but predicate nouns are also able to denote states of affairs. In this paper, we intend to analyse the verbal features of these nouns with a twofold purpose: on the one hand, we attempt to align the treatment of their complementation structures with Functional Grammar, addressing the different semantic participants involved in the event – arguments, adjuncts and disjuncts – and their syntactic codification. On the other hand, we describe and illustrate other verbal features that have not been considered as such so far, such as Aspect, Tense, Mood, and Voice. Additionally, in this work we highlight the special role played by collocations as a linguistic resource that allows the encoding of these verbal features.

This paper intends to focus on two aspects: how the Latin grammarians developed the concept of epenthesis, and how we can now give an explanation to this phenomenon. After having gathered the phonological evidence from the tradition of Latin philology, we propose that, in prehistoric Latin, the epenthesis of -t- in the -s.r- cluster, and the epenthesis of - p - in the - m.l - cluster, aimed at solving some problems in syllabification, that is avoiding an illicit syllable onset and an illicit coda-onset sequence, respectively. We then observe that, in classical Latin, the only productive process is the epenthesis of - p - in the - m.s - and - m.t - clusters, which has the function of fulfilling the faithfulness constraint on the inflection of the - m- stems, blocking the m > n assimilation process that later took place in the evolution from Latin to Italian.

The paper deals with a selection of linguistic features of Priscian’s Latin (6th century AD), namely the use of the indefinite pronoun and adjective after a negation, the declension of Greek loan-words with nominative ending in - ys , and the use of verbal moods and tenses in concessive clauses. The inquiry takes advantage of the new ongoing collation of the 8th–10th-century manuscripts of the Ars Prisciani , which enables ascription to Priscian’s linguistic use of some peculiar syntactic and morphological features that had been obliterated by the standardizing attitude of the former critical editor, Martin Hertz.