Early Latin – Morphosyntactic structures, Part 1
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Melo, Wolfgang de
General overview of grammatical relations, pragmatic functions, morphological constituents, case, adpositions, and predication.
 Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to our second part on early Latin linguistics. We are now going to look at morphosyntax after my colleague Dr Beppe Petzini has kindly talked about morphology. There are two types of languages in my opinion, in my view. There are those which look quite easy at first and then turn out to be difficult. And then there are those which look fiendishly difficult at first and then turn out to be not quite as bad. English, with its simple morphology, clearly belongs to that first type. When you learn English it starts easy enough, but then there are quite intricate prepositional usages and added difficulties. Latin, in my opinion, belongs to that second type. You start learning seemingly endless paradigms and it takes a lot of time, but once that bit is done, much of your work is done. My colleague Beppe has given an excellent overview of Latin morphology. That makes my life easier. Much of the work is done now. Here is one example. Subject and object assignment in Latin and English. If you look at English, the subject precedes the verb, the verb precedes the object. So if you say, Mark loves Anna, the subject very clearly precedes the verb and the verb precedes the object. And that's what you have to remember. You can't randomly change it around. Anna loves Mark would mean the exact opposite. It would reverse roles of lover and beloved. We can say occasionally Anna Mark loves, but that is a very highly unusual and marked word order pattern and it implies a strong contrast. For example, that Mark does not love Mary. In Latin, subject and object are marked by cases. So you have, for example, the nominative and accusative. And that indicates syntactic functions. Because of that, you can change word order patterns around without any substantial change to meaning. Mind you, not all word order patterns are equally frequent. What you can see here, subject, object, verb and subject, verb, object are roughly equally frequent in early Latin and in classical Latin. But there are very clear differences across authors and genres. Now, most statistics for that are done on classical Latin. And if you look at, for example, Cicero, Caesar and Varro, you could say by just looking at Caesar, that Latin is a verb-final language, 90% roughly of all clauses have the verb in final position. But if you now look at Cicero, it's only half-half. And if you look at Varro, verb-final position only occurs in 20 to 30% of all cases. So we can say Latin has a fairly flexible word order pattern and it doesn't make sense to speak of a verb-object or an object-verb language as such. It doesn't make sense to speak of that in the classical period and it doesn't make sense to speak of that in Plotus or Terence. Other word order patterns are relatively rare, but you get certain fixed patterns like presentative constructions where, for example, if you want to introduce someone, you can say, Fuit quantum Rix et Regina, where you have verb followed by subject for presentative structures. And that pattern can be so fixed that you don't even get proper verb agreement here. You can see Fuit is a singular and Rix et Regina should require plural agreement, but the pattern is a fixed one and so we don't change it around. Now, different word order patterns can also have different pragmatic functions and that's what we're going to look at next. Pragmatics is how we do things with words. In my example here, you can see a conditional clause in English, if you are tired. And in the first example, it is a proper conditional clause. It is a condition under which the main clause applies. In the second example, we call it a pseudo conditional clause because the existence of a coffee machine downstairs does not depend on whether you're tired or not. It doesn't magically appear or disappear depending on how tired you are. Latin does similar things, not quite as commonly as English, but it has a similar kind of pattern. Not so much for conditional clauses, but for final clauses. And you can see one here from Plotus, from the Poinulus. Cartagina egosumnatus uttusi schiens. Just so you know, I was born in Carthage. Now, the utt clause is a conditional clause, it functions as a pseudo conditional clause. It does not tell you the purpose of why I was born in Carthage. It simply informs you so that you know, just to tell you for your information. Pragmatics, of course, is a discipline in its own right, but it has a major influence on Latin syntax. The pragmatic functions relevant for our purposes are much simpler. Latin word order is influenced by factors such as which elements are old, which ones are topical, which ones are new, and which ones are contrastive or in focus. Quite commonly in early Latin, and to some extent in classical Latin, you find a structure whereby old information precedes new information, but you can overwrite that pattern if you want to front for contrast. So if you have a contrastive element, it's going to stand in front, followed by other functions. What we have seen so far is we have syntactic influences and we have pragmatic influences. Now, another thing you can find in Plortus is that we get hyperbaton, and you can see that quite nicely here. Hyperbaton is when we split up a noun phrase. We have mium patrem, my father, split up by a verb feekit, so tekinam de auro, adversum mium feekit patrem. He played a trick against my father about the gold. The noun phrase mium patrem is divided and the verb comes in between. Now, these word order patterns in early Latin are not random at all. In fact, you can follow clear statistical patterns and they tie in quite nicely with pragmatic functions. So the pattern whereby the possessive pronoun precedes its head noun and stands in hyperbaton occurs in 17% of all cases. The pattern whereby it stands directly in front makes up 37% of all cases and it follows directly in 32% of all cases. And the rarest pattern is where we have a head noun, other material and a possessive pronoun coming in 14% of all cases. Now, as I say, these word order patterns in Plortus are tied quite closely to pragmatic functions. Possessive pronouns can be contrastive. You can say it's my book, it's not your book, or you can just say that's my book and not focus on mine. Now, the more contrastive an element is, the more likely it is to stand in first position. If it's non-contrastive, it's most likely to stand in this 14% position after the head noun and in hyperbaton. So we don't get a clear one-to-one match of anything focal preceding or being in hyperbaton, but we get a very clear statistical tendency. We have now talked about grammatical factors and pragmatic factors, but there are also phonological factors affecting word order patterns in classical and in early Latin. When it comes to word order, not all words are created equal. In fact, quite often it's not even clear what should count as a word and what should count as a clitic. Across languages, we can say words can be moved around more freely, can carry their own accent, and typically have full lexical meaning. Affixes are at the other end of the spectrum, they are firmly attached to a lexical item, they're typically unaccented, and they have grammatical functions. And clitics are in between. Now, when you learn Latin at school or university, you tend to think of clitics as being a peculiarly Latin thing, but they occur in pretty much any language. You can see them in English. Mark cut the bread with a knife. We have fully accented words, mark, bread, and knife. Cut is potentially accented, and then we have unaccented clitic materials like V and A, which under normal circumstances are unstressed. They can be stressed under very specific circumstances, but typically they're proclitic elements. And then somewhere in between, we have a preposition which has more of a lexical content, but is typically also proclitic. So you can see it's a sliding scale we are dealing with. It's not a clear cut distinction between content words and clitics, and that same thing applies to Latin. We can move on to a Latin example, not an example, but a couple of Latin clitics. And these are clitics everybody is aware of, but they function in quite different ways. We get what we call second position clitics, like enim or outen. We get nouns that are followed by clitics, not in second positions like què or ve. We get proclitics, like most prepositions, and then we get a certain class of words, which are potentially second position clitics, but don't have to be. Let's look at these in turn. Things like enim or outen indicate a contrast or give a reason. They're never accented, they have a function rather than a lexical meaning, and they're clear cut clitics. We call them wakernagel clitics, named after the great Swiss scholar, and they always come in second position. When you look at què and ve, these two, those are coordinators, and they attach to complex noun phrases. We get noun one, noun two, followed by què and ve. These are again clitic elements, and they form a firm unit with a noun phrase, but they're not second position clitics. Then we get as lexical elements, or somewhat lexical elements, most prepositions, which follow again a different pattern. They can stand in front of a noun phrase, in early Latin sometimes they can be post-positions and stand behind a noun phrase, but they're generally clitic elements with a bit more freedom than stuff like què and ve. And you can see that my list also contains personal pronouns, ego, du, mihi, dibi, and so on. Personal pronouns are much more complex. Personal pronouns have some lexical content, and they can be contrastive. If a personal pronoun is contrastive, it's not a clitic, and it will not normally stand in second position. But if it's not contrastive, it's normally unstressed, and it follows the vakanagel pattern. Now, the good thing about early Latin is we can test to what extent an element is clitic or not by using certain metrical tests for clitical, and these apply particularly to early Latin with its intricate metrical rules. So, for example, we get ayambic shortening, we get the law of Bentley and Lux, or Ritzel's law, and the law of Hermann and Lachmann. Ayambic shortening is a particularly interesting case. If you want to address a lady, someone you're in love with, you can call her my darling, and that would be mia wallup das, or you can say wallup das mia. Now, the interesting thing is in early Latin, if you just have wallup das, that second syllable lup is a heavy syllable, and if you say mia wallup das, it remains a heavy syllable. But if you put mia afterwards in Plortus and Terence, that same syllable lup is invariably shortened, and it counts as a light syllable. What that means in practical terms in is that wallup das mia becomes a single, existential phrase, the original accent disappears, and there must be another accent on das, which allows for shortening of lup. So, you can see possessive pronouns can function as clitics to some extent. The other metrical laws I've mentioned here deal with obligatory word end or absence of word end, and they're particularly important for our purposes because what they tell us is to what extent things like què and què, or enim and autem function as clitics. And what we can see here is that què and què are very strong clitics. They create a single word unit, but things like wallup das mia is not quite as clitic as a noun with què and què attached to it. So these are things we can see in early Latin that you're not going to see from classical Latin quite as easily. I have drawn on about factors influencing Latin word order. The reason for that is I'm not going to talk much about it in the rest of my Morpho-Syntax part. In a language like English, word order is a major topic. In Latin, it's of secondary importance. We have four segments left in this section, and the first topic I'm going to cover is cases and adpositions. We're going to look at basic functions of the six cases, at core cases versus periphery, and at adpositions and how they grammaticalize. From there, we move on to predication. We will look at valency, the distinction between active and passive, and related phenomena. Essentially, we're covering what in traditional grammars is referred to as the simple sentence. From there, we will move on to the clause, and we will start with finite clauses, with a finite verb, making a distinction between relative clauses, indirect questions, and adverbial clauses. We're going to look at sequence of tenses, moods, and we're going to look at adverbial clauses and how they function. And finally, in my last segment, we're going to look at non-finite clauses, at the accusative and infinitive construction, the accusative and participle construction, absolute and relative tense, the early Latin usage of infinitives, and ellipses of subject accusatives. And when we are done with that, you should hopefully have a good understanding of what sets early Latin apart. Many thanks and gratias, wobeys, ago.
 Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to our second part on early Latin linguistics.  We are now going to look at morphosyntax after my colleague Dr Beppe Petzini has kindly talked about morphology.  There are two types of languages in my opinion, in my view.  There are those which look quite easy at first and then turn out to be difficult.  And then there are those which look fiendishly difficult at first  and then turn out to be not quite as bad.  English, with its simple morphology, clearly belongs to that first type.  When you learn English it starts easy enough, but then there are quite intricate prepositional usages and added difficulties.  Latin, in my opinion, belongs to that second type.  You start learning seemingly endless paradigms and it takes a lot of time,  but once that bit is done, much of your work is done.  My colleague Beppe has given an excellent overview of Latin morphology.  That makes my life easier. Much of the work is done now.  Here is one example. Subject and object assignment in Latin and English.  If you look at English, the subject precedes the verb, the verb precedes the object.  So if you say, Mark loves Anna, the subject very clearly precedes the verb and the verb precedes the object.  And that's what you have to remember. You can't randomly change it around.  Anna loves Mark would mean the exact opposite. It would reverse roles of lover and beloved.  We can say occasionally Anna Mark loves, but that is a very highly unusual and marked word order pattern  and it implies a strong contrast. For example, that Mark does not love Mary.  In Latin, subject and object are marked by cases. So you have, for example, the nominative and accusative.  And that indicates syntactic functions.  Because of that, you can change word order patterns around without any substantial change to meaning.  Mind you, not all word order patterns are equally frequent.  What you can see here, subject, object, verb and subject, verb, object are roughly equally frequent in early Latin and in classical Latin.  But there are very clear differences across authors and genres.  Now, most statistics for that are done on classical Latin.  And if you look at, for example, Cicero, Caesar and Varro, you could say by just looking at Caesar,  that Latin is a verb-final language, 90% roughly of all clauses have the verb in final position.  But if you now look at Cicero, it's only half-half.  And if you look at Varro, verb-final position only occurs in 20 to 30% of all cases.  So we can say Latin has a fairly flexible word order pattern  and it doesn't make sense to speak of a verb-object or an object-verb language as such.  It doesn't make sense to speak of that in the classical period  and it doesn't make sense to speak of that in Plotus or Terence.  Other word order patterns are relatively rare, but you get certain fixed patterns like presentative constructions  where, for example, if you want to introduce someone, you can say, Fuit quantum Rix et Regina,  where you have verb followed by subject for presentative structures.  And that pattern can be so fixed that you don't even get proper verb agreement here.  You can see Fuit is a singular and Rix et Regina should require plural agreement,  but the pattern is a fixed one and so we don't change it around.  Now, different word order patterns can also have different pragmatic functions  and that's what we're going to look at next.  Pragmatics is how we do things with words.  In my example here, you can see a conditional clause in English, if you are tired.  And in the first example, it is a proper conditional clause.  It is a condition under which the main clause applies.  In the second example, we call it a pseudo conditional clause  because the existence of a coffee machine downstairs does not depend on whether you're tired or not.  It doesn't magically appear or disappear depending on how tired you are.  Latin does similar things, not quite as commonly as English, but it has a similar kind of pattern.  Not so much for conditional clauses, but for final clauses.  And you can see one here from Plotus, from the Poinulus.  Cartagina egosumnatus uttusi schiens.  Just so you know, I was born in Carthage.  Now, the utt clause is a conditional clause, it functions as a pseudo conditional clause.  It does not tell you the purpose of why I was born in Carthage.  It simply informs you so that you know, just to tell you for your information.  Pragmatics, of course, is a discipline in its own right, but it has a major influence on Latin syntax.  The pragmatic functions relevant for our purposes are much simpler.  Latin word order is influenced by factors such as which elements are old, which ones are topical, which ones are new,  and which ones are contrastive or in focus.  Quite commonly in early Latin, and to some extent in classical Latin, you find a structure whereby old information precedes new information,  but you can overwrite that pattern if you want to front for contrast.  So if you have a contrastive element, it's going to stand in front, followed by other functions.  What we have seen so far is we have syntactic influences and we have pragmatic influences.  Now, another thing you can find in Plortus is that we get hyperbaton, and you can see that quite nicely here.  Hyperbaton is when we split up a noun phrase.  We have mium patrem, my father, split up by a verb feekit, so tekinam de auro, adversum mium feekit patrem.  He played a trick against my father about the gold.  The noun phrase mium patrem is divided and the verb comes in between.  Now, these word order patterns in early Latin are not random at all.  In fact, you can follow clear statistical patterns and they tie in quite nicely with pragmatic functions.  So the pattern whereby the possessive pronoun precedes its head noun and stands in hyperbaton occurs in 17% of all cases.  The pattern whereby it stands directly in front makes up 37% of all cases and it follows directly in 32% of all cases.  And the rarest pattern is where we have a head noun, other material and a possessive pronoun coming in 14% of all cases.  Now, as I say, these word order patterns in Plortus are tied quite closely to pragmatic functions.  Possessive pronouns can be contrastive. You can say it's my book, it's not your book, or you can just say that's my book and not focus on mine.  Now, the more contrastive an element is, the more likely it is to stand in first position.  If it's non-contrastive, it's most likely to stand in this 14% position after the head noun and in hyperbaton.  So we don't get a clear one-to-one match of anything focal preceding or being in hyperbaton, but we get a very clear statistical tendency.  We have now talked about grammatical factors and pragmatic factors, but there are also phonological factors affecting word order patterns in classical and in early Latin.  When it comes to word order, not all words are created equal.  In fact, quite often it's not even clear what should count as a word and what should count as a clitic.  Across languages, we can say words can be moved around more freely, can carry their own accent, and typically have full lexical meaning.  Affixes are at the other end of the spectrum, they are firmly attached to a lexical item, they're typically unaccented, and they have grammatical functions.  And clitics are in between.  Now, when you learn Latin at school or university, you tend to think of clitics as being a peculiarly Latin thing, but they occur in pretty much any language.  You can see them in English. Mark cut the bread with a knife.  We have fully accented words, mark, bread, and knife.  Cut is potentially accented, and then we have unaccented clitic materials like V and A, which under normal circumstances are unstressed.  They can be stressed under very specific circumstances, but typically they're proclitic elements.  And then somewhere in between, we have a preposition which has more of a lexical content, but is typically also proclitic.  So you can see it's a sliding scale we are dealing with.  It's not a clear cut distinction between content words and clitics, and that same thing applies to Latin.  We can move on to a Latin example, not an example, but a couple of Latin clitics.  And these are clitics everybody is aware of, but they function in quite different ways.  We get what we call second position clitics, like enim or outen.  We get nouns that are followed by clitics, not in second positions like què or ve.  We get proclitics, like most prepositions, and then we get a certain class of words, which are potentially second position clitics, but don't have to be.  Let's look at these in turn.  Things like enim or outen indicate a contrast or give a reason.  They're never accented, they have a function rather than a lexical meaning, and they're clear cut clitics.  We call them wakernagel clitics, named after the great Swiss scholar, and they always come in second position.  When you look at què and ve, these two, those are coordinators, and they attach to complex noun phrases.  We get noun one, noun two, followed by què and ve.  These are again clitic elements, and they form a firm unit with a noun phrase, but they're not second position clitics.  Then we get as lexical elements, or somewhat lexical elements, most prepositions, which follow again a different pattern.  They can stand in front of a noun phrase, in early Latin sometimes they can be post-positions and stand behind a noun phrase,  but they're generally clitic elements with a bit more freedom than stuff like què and ve.  And you can see that my list also contains personal pronouns, ego, du, mihi, dibi, and so on.  Personal pronouns are much more complex. Personal pronouns have some lexical content, and they can be contrastive.  If a personal pronoun is contrastive, it's not a clitic, and it will not normally stand in second position.  But if it's not contrastive, it's normally unstressed, and it follows the vakanagel pattern.  Now, the good thing about early Latin is we can test to what extent an element is clitic or not  by using certain metrical tests for clitical, and these apply particularly to early Latin with its intricate metrical rules.  So, for example, we get ayambic shortening, we get the law of Bentley and Lux, or Ritzel's law, and the law of Hermann and Lachmann.  Ayambic shortening is a particularly interesting case.  If you want to address a lady, someone you're in love with, you can call her my darling, and that would be mia wallup das,  or you can say wallup das mia.  Now, the interesting thing is in early Latin, if you just have wallup das, that second syllable lup is a heavy syllable,  and if you say mia wallup das, it remains a heavy syllable.  But if you put mia afterwards in Plortus and Terence, that same syllable lup is invariably shortened, and it counts as a light syllable.  What that means in practical terms in is that wallup das mia becomes a single, existential phrase, the original accent disappears,  and there must be another accent on das, which allows for shortening of lup.  So, you can see possessive pronouns can function as clitics to some extent.  The other metrical laws I've mentioned here deal with obligatory word end or absence of word end,  and they're particularly important for our purposes because what they tell us is to what extent things like què and què, or enim and autem function as clitics.  And what we can see here is that què and què are very strong clitics.  They create a single word unit, but things like wallup das mia is not quite as clitic as a noun with què and què attached to it.  So these are things we can see in early Latin that you're not going to see from classical Latin quite as easily.  I have drawn on about factors influencing Latin word order.  The reason for that is I'm not going to talk much about it in the rest of my Morpho-Syntax part.  In a language like English, word order is a major topic.  In Latin, it's of secondary importance.  We have four segments left in this section, and the first topic I'm going to cover is cases and adpositions.  We're going to look at basic functions of the six cases, at core cases versus periphery, and at adpositions and how they grammaticalize.  From there, we move on to predication.  We will look at valency, the distinction between active and passive, and related phenomena.  Essentially, we're covering what in traditional grammars is referred to as the simple sentence.  From there, we will move on to the clause, and we will start with finite clauses, with a finite verb,  making a distinction between relative clauses, indirect questions, and adverbial clauses.  We're going to look at sequence of tenses, moods, and we're going to look at adverbial clauses and how they function.  And finally, in my last segment, we're going to look at non-finite clauses, at the accusative and infinitive construction,  the accusative and participle construction, absolute and relative tense, the early Latin usage of infinitives, and ellipses of subject accusatives.  And when we are done with that, you should hopefully have a good understanding of what sets early Latin apart.  Many thanks and gratias, wobeys, ago.
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