Periphrastic comparison in Latin

The corpus-based study presented in this paper offers a better understanding of the evolution of double periphrastic comparatives in the Renaissance than the one provided in the literature. Analysing the works of major dramatists and some relevant corpora of the period, I show that the double periphrastic forms were a characteristic feature of elevated registers and upper class speech. In addition, I demonstrate that they did not disappear from the written language -as the specialised literature claims -in the second half of the seventeenth century but much earlier, as a result of the gradual loss of prestige that they underwent from the last decade of the sixteenth century. Finally, the paper suggests that both standardisation and prescriptivism did not trigger but, instead, merely reinforced the social downgrading of the double periphrastic comparatives, and points to the need of taking into consideration factors other than the ones suggested in the literature in order to obtain a more complete explanation of the stigmatisation process.

Recent Trends and Findings in Latin Linguistics. Vol. I. Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics; Vol. II. Semantics and Lexicography. Discourse and Dialogue, Boston/Berlin, De Gruyter, 2024

The volumes contain a selection of contributions fi rst presented at the 21st International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, held in Santiago de Compostela in 2022. They cover essential topics in Latin linguistics from a variety of theoretical and metho dological approaches. The first volume includes papers on Latin Syntax and Semantics, Latin Syntax and Pragmatics, Greek-Latin language, and Digital Linguistics; the second volume includes papers on Semantics and Lexicography, Etymology, Discourse strategies, and a special section devoted to the analysis of Conversation and Dialogue.

Journal of Latin Linguistics , 2022

In many respects Latin poetry deviates from the linguistic norms of prose; such deviations are often attributed to non-linguistic factors, with the result that the language of Latin poetry is more often studied by literary scholars than by linguists. A frequent poetic phenomenon are discontinuous adjectivenoun phrases, which tend to be explained by appeal to various artistic considerations. The present contribution argues that syntactic discontinuity in poetry is not arbitrary, but is subject to linguistic constraints, which are largely the same as in prose. By scrutinising 120 non-discontinuous adjective-noun phrases in the Ciris (out of a total of 531 adjective-noun phrases), it is demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of such phrases fall into a number of specific syntactic and semantic categories, while outside these categories discontinuity appears to be the rule.

The history of indefinite quantifiers in Romance languages is basically the history of the development of new distributional patterns in the case of some Latin adjectives (Company 1991, 1997; Batllori 1998). This new distribution will contribute to the construction of the new subclass of Romance determiners we call Quantifiers. As explained by Zamparelli (2000), the growing structural complexity of the left margin of DetP entails the specialization of old word classes for those new positions. A Quantifier position creates thus the Quantifier word class. This is a longterm process, the effects of which are clearly seen in medieval Romance for words derived from adjectives, such as MULTUS and PAUCUS, but also in later Romance adjectives such as Catalan bastant or even in Contemporary Catalan with the word suficient, which has a similar meaning (Brucart; Rigau 2002, Camus 2005, 2008, 2009).

This paper examines the enormous productivity of Latin in the English language throughout time. Influences, however, will be remarked on the lexical and morphological fields. Therefore, due to length restrictions, other aspects such as phonology will be overlooked. Firstly, the general linguistic, historical and social contextualization of Latin will be described. In other words, it will be analyzed how Latin came into contact with English. Afterwards, different periods of influence will be covered, as well as the morphological heritage that the English language took from Latin, ranging from derivation (i.e. prefixation and suffixation) to inflectional and compound processes. In all cases, the most illustrative examples will be offered. Finally, the etymological explanation will help to establish certain parallelisms between Latin and English. Thereby, it will be essential to state the idea, that English and Latin share numerous similar features, is still present, despite belonging to different language families, as well as their own peculiarities, which is to say, those properties that make both languages different in comparison to other ones.

2024

This paper aims to present an ongoing largescale classification of Brazilian Portuguese adjectives. The 2,000 most frequent adjective lemmas in a reference corpus, corresponding to 87.94% of the occurrences of adjectives, were classified into predicative and non-predicative. The former were further classified based on argument number (one or two) and type (noun phrase or clause), which led to six different classes of predicative adjectives plus two subclasses. The results suggest that the most representative class is non-predicative adjectives, followed by intransitive adjectives with noun phrase and clausal subjects, respectively.

Adjectives. Formal analyses in syntax and semantics. John Benjamins., 2010

Computers and The Humanities, 1990

This article describes a second aspect of the Project for Latin Lexicography (see previous article). We here concentrate on two aspects of the project. First, we describe the morphological analyzer, which comprises a base dictionary, a table of suffixes, a table of endings and a table of postfixes. Second, we describe the lemmatization module, which operates by reference to a series of grammatical codes or information given for the base, and reference codes. Giuseppe Cappelli is a program analyst working at the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the National Research Council of Pisa. He has written the software for the morphosyntactic analyzer of the Spanish language. He has also written the software for the morphological analyser of the Latin language in collaboration with the Classics Department of Turin University. At present, Cappelli is involved in the study of child language. His publications include (with M.N. Catarsi, A. Saba and D. Ratti) “A Morphosyntactic analyser for Spanish”, Computers in Literary and Linguistic Research, Pisa: Giardini Editori, 1982; and (with A. Bozzi) “A Latin Morphological Analyser,” in Data Base Oriented Source Editions, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1988.

Introduction to Vulgar Latin. Introduction to Vulgar Latin (Summerschool course), Summer semester 2012–13, Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics VIII, Leiden University, Leiden. (Slides.)

BMCR 2012.09.24

Journal of Latin Linguistics , 2014

It is usually assumed that Latin parts of speech cannot be properly applied to other languages, especially outside the Indo-European domain. We will see, however, that the traditional distinction into eight parts of speech is established only in the late period of the classical school of grammar, while originally parts of speech varied in number and in type according to different grammarians, as well as to different periods and genres. Comparisons will be drawn on the one hand with parts of speech in the Greek and Indian tradition, and on the other with genetically unrelated languages where parts of speech -notably adjectives and adverbs -are scarcely grammaticalized. This may be revealing of the manner in which the ancients used to categorize their language.

utline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin represents an altogether novel approach to its subject. Most innovative is the format: instead of technical prose acting as an obstacle to non-specialists, each of the forty-five chapters consists of an outline providing exactly the information essential to the student and simultaneously acting as a ready reference tool. But this is no bare-bones work. Supplementing the outline are numerous penetrating notes with a wealth of additional information and important new observations and ideas. After initial chapters on Indo-European comparative philology, the history of writing in Italy, and the pronunciation of Latin, the book treats the language’s entire historical phonology and morphology in detail, followed by a full and enlightening chapter on syntax—a topic that rarely receives the coverage it deserves. Thousands of textual citations from Roman authors of all periods firmly ground the data in their philological context. The broader linguistic milieu of ancient Italy is also covered, with a whole chapter devoted to Etruscan; and rounding out the book is a rich overview of the later evolution of Latin into the Romance languages. The result is the first truly comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date history of Latin from its prehistoric beginnings down to its medieval and modern descendants. Clear, thorough, and exhaustively researched, this Outline will be essential reading for students and specialists in Classics and Indo-European studies for many years to come.

The present paper offers a detailed description and analysis of the adjectival declensional patterns in the Modern Vilamovicean language. Modern Vilamovicean possesses six declensional patterns, restricted to distinct environments, that, from a morphological perspective, form a continuum ranging from a strong declension (classes 1, 2 and 3) to a weak one (class 6), through intermediate mixed paradigms (classes 4 and 5). Nowadays, only the mixed and weak classes are productive and common. If compared with Classical Vilamovicean, the adjectival declension has suffered a process of syncretism and decay, evolving towards a two-case marking: nominative vs. accusative-dative in the masculine singular and nominativeaccusative vs. dative elsewhere. Thus, the adjectival morphological case marking is more effective than in the nominal system (where no case distinction is usually made), but less successful than in the pronominal system (where a three-case distinction predominates). Within a typological-grammaticalisation framework, the inflectional organisation of Vilamovicean adjectives can be defined as an advanced case system.

Publicado en Adjective adverb interfaces in Romance, M. Hummel y S. Valera (eds.), Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 257-286.

Espinal, María T. / Leonetti, Manuel / McNally, Louise (eds.), Proceedings of the IV Nereus International Workshop “Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages”, 2009

, which we would like to thank very much for their support, patience and helpful critical remarks. Some preliminary versions have been presented in November 2006 at the "Institut für Deutsche Sprache", Mannheim, at the international workshop "Syntax der Nominalphrase", and in September 2007 in Vienna, at the workshop "Fokus und Hintergrund in den romanischen Sprachen", at the XXXth meeting of German romanists.