Analysis of the Latin Verb


Book Description







The Early Latin Verb System


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Latin extra-paradigmatic verb forms, that is, verb forms which cannot easily be assigned to any particular tense in the Latin verbal system. In order to see what functions such forms fulfil, one has to compare their usage to that of the regular verb forms. In Part 1, Wolfgang de Melo outlines the usage of regular verb forms, which, surprisingly, has not always been described adequately in the standard grammars. In Part 2, the central partof the book, he compares the usage of the extra-paradigmatic verb forms to that of the regular ones, restricting himself to Archaic Latin (roughly before 100 BC); here he makes many new and unexpected discoveries. In Part 3, de Melo shows how synchronic usage can help us to reconstruct earlierstages of the language which are not attested; he also points out that, while most of the extra-paradigmatic forms die out after 100 BC, some survive - and that such survival is by no means a matter of chance.




Terence and the Verb 'to Be' in Latin


Book Description

Terence and the Verb 'To Be' in Latin is the first in-depth study of the verb 'to be' in Latin (esse) and some of its hidden properties. Like the English 'be' (e.g. it's), the Latin forms of esse could undergo phonetic reduction or contraction. This phenomenon is largely unknown since classical texts have undergone a long process of transmission over the centuries, which has altered or deleted its traces. Although they are often neglected by scholars and puzzling to students, the use of contracted forms is shown to be widespread and significant. These forms expose the clitic nature of esse, which also explains other properties of the verb, including its participation in a prosodic simplification with a host ending in -s (sigmatic ecthlipsis), a phenomenon which is also discussed in the volume. After an introduction on methodology, the volume discusses the linguistic significance of such phenomena, focusing in particular on analysis of their behaviour in the plays of the ancient Roman playwright, Terence. Combining traditional scholarship with the use of digital resources, the volume explores the orthographic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic aspects of the verb esse, revealing that cliticization is a key feature of the verb 'to be' in Latin, and that contractions deserve a place within its paradigm.




Inflectional Morphology


Book Description

This book offers a thorough discussion of morphological theory and is based directly on an 'inflecting' or 'fusional' language - Latin.




Latin Grammar SparkCharts


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SparkCharts(tm): The information you need-concisely, conveniently, and accurately. Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, these study companions and reference tools cover a wide range of college and graduate school subjects, from Business and Computer Programming to Medicine, Law, and Languages. They'll give you what it takes to find success in school and beyond. Outlines and summaries cover key points, while diagrams and tables make difficult concepts easier to grasp. This six-page chart reviews: Nouns Adjectives Pronouns Verb tenses and conjugations Adverbs Use of cases Grammatical constructions




Latin Word Order


Book Description

Word order is not a subject anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore: apart from anything else, word order is what gets one from disjoint sentences to coherent text. Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at best using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book begins by introducing the reader to the linguistic concepts, formalism and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then proceeds to present and analyze a representative selection of data in sufficient detail for the reader to develop both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this work aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general crosscategorial system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.




The Romance reflexes of the Latin infixes –I/ESC- and -IDI-: restructuring and remodeling processes.


Book Description

Eines der hervorstechenden Merkmale der romanischen Verbalmorphologie ist der Fortbestand der zwei lateinischen Überbleibsel -I/ESC- und -IDI̯-, deren formaler und funktionaler Gebrauch sich innerhalb der romanischen Sprachen um zwei grundlegende Pole dreht: -I/ESC- und -IDI̯- können als Derivations- oder als Flexionsmorpheme (oder zumindest flexionsgebunden) stehen. Obwohl -I/ESC- und -IDI̯- eine sehr vergleichbare Entwicklung genommen haben, sind sie noch nie in einer gemeinsamen Studie untersucht worden. Während das Schicksal von -I/ESC- bei Romanisten auf großes Interesse stieß, wurde die Verbindung zu -IDI̯- bis dato nur fragmentarisch beschrieben. Die vorliegende Studie möchte diese Lücke durch eine ergänzende Analyse der "Metamorphosen", die beide Segmente in der Fortentwicklung vom Lateinischen zum Romanischen genommen haben, schließen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf den Flexions- bzw. flexionsgebundenen Formen in den gegenwärtigen romanischen Sprachen. In methodischer Hinsicht kombiniert die Studie eine umfassende heuristische Analyse mit der Korpusanalyse neuer, empirisch erhobener Daten auf der Basis von (dialektologischer) Feldarbeit, elektronischen Befragungen, (neuesten) Wörterbüchern und Dialektatlanten. Die behandelten Themen verbinden Bereiche der theoretischen, historischen und Soziolinguistik.




Exploring Latin: Structures, Functions, Meaning


Book Description

This two-volume work contains a selection of papers first presented at the 22nd International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, held in Prague (2023). The papers address important issues in Latin linguistics with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. The first volume ("Word") contains texts concerning Latin phonology, etymology, flexion and derivation, and lexical semantics, both with respect to individual words and to entire word classes. Both diachronic and synchronic perspectives are employed in the discussion of the various issues. The second volume ("Clause and Discourse") includes papers dealing with issues of syntax and semantics, and with the structure of texts and pragmatic aspects. One of the subchapters, entitled "Conversation and Dialogue", contains papers presented at the conference in a separate workshop of the same name, linked by a common methodological framework of "Conversation Analysis". This book provides essential texts for researchers in the field of Latin linguistics and may also be of use to linguists who work primarily with other languages.




The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French


Book Description

This book analyzes - in terms of branching - the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte L.M. Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head". Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficulty of left-branching complex structures as reflected in their painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages. The author uses data from child language acquisition studies to support her thought-provoking claim.