Volume 64, Issue 2 -

This paper investigates the status of possessive expressions in Oscan and Umbrian in an attempt to determine whether these languages are “ be -languages” like the conservative Hittite or Latvian, or “ have -languages” like the innovating Latin or German. The inquiry is carried out by examining approximately thirty tokens of the “have” verb from the Oscan Tabula Bantina and the Umbrian Iguvine Tables . Based entirely on this evidence, the conclusion is that Umbrian has changed from the inherited mihi est type with be to the have type, while Oscan remains a be -language without a fully developed verb of possession.

This paper deals with a Latin reflexivization strategy distinct from other reflexive constructions. It consists of first and second person pronouns which are used to emphasize the first and second person referents in Old Latin comedy by certain emphasizing elements like ‑ met in egomet or ‑ te in tūte . The form and function of these emphasizing personal pronouns has not been observed and described yet. Moreover, the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic status of this reflexivization strategy has hitherto been unknown. The elements ‑ met and ‑ te are likely to be derived from suffixes which have an identifying and emphasizing function similar to German selbst ‘self’. Reflexivization here obviously is connected to focalization, a typologically well-known relationship.

This article is about compound verbs in Latin that govern a dative case for their second or third argument, although the simple verbs they are related to do not govern a dative themselves. With most compounds the use of the dative can be explained by referring to one or more (classes of) verbs with a similar meaning, or – especially in creative texts – by assuming a more complicated bridge, which is none the less semantic. One semantic feature that seems to be important is the degree of control of the subject over the state of affairs.

The manifestations of Latin asyndesis, traditionally discussed in the framework of stylistics, are here grouped into three major classes: (a) occasional absence of connectors, testifying to personal-style preferences or belonging to specific registers and genres and characterizing stages of the language; (b) invariable lack of connectors in well-defined syntactic environments which consistently exclude the use of intersentential connectors; and (c) linguistically pertinent non-connection, which is hereunder exemplified in two Latin syntactic patterns; such absence of connector is shown to participate in paradigms of connectors (established by means of collocability and exclusion): zero constitutes a legitimate member of the paradigm of Latin apodotic superordinators and the paradigm of Latin epitaxis-introductory elements.

We propose a description of the semantic network of the Latin prepositional phrase per ‘through’ + Accusative in the early stage of this language. Drawing upon the insights of Cognitive Grammar, we analyze the role of the schematic import in the spread from basic to abstract meanings. Finally, we draw a map of the polysemous network of per , showing that the continuity of the different, but consistently linked, meanings does not necessarily imply the unidirectionality of the concrete-to-abstract shifts.

Classical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.