Volume 23, Issue 1-2

After the merger of the perfect and aorist stems, the resulting perfectum stem in Latin kept its less central functions such as resultativity and ingressivity as marked aspectual meanings in its semantic potential. Occurring first in literary and especially poetic text, as a dormant, archaic function, its use was revived in the 4th century due to intensifying exchanges with New Testament Greek, where the ingressive aorist was still more productive. The current paper examines, on the basis of a representative sample selected from all relevant time periods and various text types, perfectum stem forms of a substantial number of stative verbs in a close-reading process, in order to ascertain more accurately the dynamics of the diachrony of Latin ingressivity. The occurrence rate of this form-function pairing is compared to significant alternations of a number of contextual factors, such as discourse type, mood, predicate fronting and the dynamics in the system of lexical ingressivity.

Lexical reciprocal verbs, defined as those verbs that inherently lexicalize a symmetric situation, e.g., consentio ‘agree’, occur in at least three distinct argument structure constructions, depending on whether their participants are expressed as a single (plural) subject, asymmetrically expressed – one as subject and the other one as oblique – or only one is overtly realized. Drawing from extensive data from a corpus of Latin texts (extracted from the LASLA corpus) and by resorting to quantitative analyses, I investigate the extent to which these three constructions are used with a sample of lexical reciprocal verbs and explore possible motivations for the alternation. Corpus data shows that a multiplicity of factors co-operate in motivating speakers’ choice of one construction over the other, pointing to the need to integrate fine-grained corpus analyses in the study of argument structure constructions and their alternations more generally.

This article aims to fill a gap in the current literature on the pragmatics of Latin by proposing a corpus-based analysis of the different words (e.g., ut , uelut , sicut ), phrases (e.g., exempli gratia , uerbi causa ), and constructions (e.g., ut puta , si dicas ) exploited to signal the process of exemplification. The structures and devices that perform this discursive operation are essentially neglected in Latin handbooks of syntax and stylistics, and only sparse comments on individual forms can be found in the lexica and in recent literature. To investigate these understudied issues, we have devised a functional taxonomy centred around the notions of meta-exemplification, canonical exemplification, and para-exemplification. The analysis of the data illustrating the different strategies and signals of exemplification is based on the tenets of historical pragmatics. The discussion focuses on the multiple roles and emergence of example markers in different textual genres, with special attention to technical prose and grammatical treatises, where examples are crucial in describing natural categories and explaining linguistic phenomena. The significance of the results extends beyond the Latin language and sheds light on the origin and development of example markers in general.

Longstanding debate persists regarding the classification of Latin ecce as word class. While some scholars regard it as a particle or demonstrative, others characterize it as an interjection. This study examines the implications of these approaches and analyzes the behavior of ecce in Archaic Latin according to different grammatical and semantic criteria. The analysis confirms that ecce functions primarily as a predicative demonstrative. Furthermore, it contends that ecce can be specifically categorized as a presentative predicative demonstrative. These results suggest that the interjectional use of this demonstrative must have arisen only secondarily.

The term ( h ) ariuga/ ( h ) aruiga is exclusively attested as a gloss for a sacrificial animal in Latin grammarians. However, inconsistencies in the textual transmission of the term – with fluctuations in the presence or absence of the initial h- and a different sequence of the (semi-)vocalic elements of the central syllable – necessitate a critical examination of the manuscript tradition of primary sources like Varro and Festus. A subsequent morphological analysis aims to determine the word’s structure. This study reviews previous etymological proposals, ultimately rejecting those deemed untenable and ranking the remaining possibilities. By comparing Latin and Greek data, we dismiss the notion of a simple term, prevalent until the 19th century. While most contemporary scholars favor a compound structure, their reconstructions often face semantic challenges. Our research re-examines the hypothesis of a derivative with the prefix ad-  and introduces novel explanations to enhance the semantic plausibility of the term.

This article discusses discontinuity of the noun phrase, i.e. the separation of adjectival, genitival, or other modifiers from their head noun in Latin legal texts from the Republican period. Despite the common view that discontinuity, often termed ‘hyperbaton’, is a stylistic device, the study shows that discontinuity is also found in legal texts. Discontinuity mainly occurs with relative and indefinite pronouns as well as with genitival modifiers, and it is pragmatically motivated. Additionally, noun and prepositional phrases are regularly split by the enclitic coordinators - que ‘and’ and -ve ‘or’ in legal texts.

Qui pro quo is an excellent means of creating a comic effect in ancient drama, particularly in the comedies of Plautus. In this study, qui pro quo is metaphorically transferred from drama to grammar and applied to the phenomenon of substituting one grammatical category for another. First, I will introduce the notion of canonical and non-canonical grammatical meaning, which is crucial for the idea of grammatical qui pro quo. The concept of oppositions and neutralisation will be proposed as a scientific hypothesis to explain why language employs this strategy. Then I will analyse the qui pro quo technique within the categories of tense and mood (e.g., Praesens pro futuro, Futurum pro praesente, Imperfectum pro praesente, Indicativus pro coniunctivo, Infinitivus pro indicativo, Indicativus pro imperativo, etc., nine patterns in all). After considering verbal categories, the sentential qui pro quo will be observed in five types of sentences with different illocutionary force. Finally, the effect of the phenomenon in question on the insubordinate ut -, si -, and quasi -clauses will be shown. In the end, I will summarise the findings and explain the mechanism of grammatical qui pro quo as manifestation of the neutralisation principle.