The period 100 BC – AD 100 is often seen by scholars as the time when the 'standard' form of educated Latin was established. Standardisation, according to some, was the defining process for the fixing of written language and written norms. Once established, these written norms, we are led to believe, remained unchanged for the rest of the Antiquity. This study addresses this alleged standardisation of Latin in 100 BC – AD 100 by studying variations in spelling and morphology. Elimination of variation is a central part of establishing a standard language, while continuing variation characterises lack of standardisation. By studying variation in a diachronic perspective, therefore, we are able to assess the evidence for standardisation or lack thereof. Complete standardisation can be achieved mainly in spelling: therefore, the study of spelling is central for determining the existence of any standardisation movement. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to studying spelling variation in high-register formal inscriptions, where standardisation ought to be most evident. We discuss variation of the type maximus/maxumus, variant spellings ei and i for /ī/ and variation between assimilated and non-assimilated spelling of prefixes. A separate chapter addresses the spelling reform of Claudius. The second part of the thesis focuses on cases of morphological variation in literary and non-literary texts (variation between quis and quibus in the dat./abl. pl. and variation between active and deponent forms of verbs). The study of these cases of variation should add to our knowledge of language development in this period and provide a basis on which to begin a reassessment of standardisation in Latin. Language attitudes of literary authors and authors of nonliterary texts, which are relevant for the question of standardisation, will also be considered. My overall conclusion is that it is easy to exaggerate the importance of any standardising, and that it is important not to mix up uncontrolled linguistic change, which is a phenomenon of any language, and change, or fixing, that is the result of the conscious and deliberate efforts of language purists.

In this thesis I examine the placement of the dependent genitive relative to its head noun in Classical Latin prose. The corpus is drawn from the works of four first-century B.C. authors: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust and Varro. The thesis itself is split into two main sections, a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis discusses a number of factors that may influence genitive position, drawn from literature on the subject as well as my pilot studies. These factors are information structure, the genitive’s grammatical function, discontinuity, lexical category, animacy, prepositions governing the head noun, reported speech, idioms, lexical items, and grammatical number of the genitive. This analysis examines individual instances of genitive position in context, providing examples and counter-examples of the ordering patterns found with each potential factor. The qualitative analysis suggests that a number of these factors have an effect on genitive position, particularly information structure. These results are tested by the quantitative analysis. By performing a multivariate statistical analysis using the programme GoldVarb, the combined effects of multiple factors are determined and the statistically significant factors ranked in order of importance and strength of effect. The statistics show that information structure is the most important of the factors. Other significant influences are the presence of prepositions, the function of the genitive and its lexical category. By combining the two types of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, this thesis shows in detail how the factors combine to influence word order, which of them are independent, which interact, which are important and which have little to no effect at all, resulting in a better understanding of the data and the way that the contextual factors work together to produce the variant orders of the dependent genitive.

The main topic of the thesis is a discussion of the contraction of esse (-st < est , -'s < -es), a widespread phenomenon in Latin comedy, generally known as ‘prodelision’. The thesis collects evidence for contracted forms from a large variety of sources (e.g. inscriptions, Sabellian languages and ancient grammarians) and analyses their transmission in the manuscript tradition of Latin authors. Contracted forms appear to be widespread but are neglected by or puzzling to editors. They are not misspellings, abbreviations, or representations of a sandhi phenomenon related to elision (‘prodelision’), but are clitic forms of the verb esse, showing phonetic reduction. The thesis discusses their linguistic significance, relying in particular on analysis of their behaviour in Terence: auxiliary or copula esse is clitic and its standard position seems to be clause-final, attached to the participle or predicate noun or adjective. Second, the thesis analyses another complex phenomenon of early Latin, the prosodical omission of final -s before a consonant (sigmatic ecthlipsis), relying on a database of all Terence's lines potentially involving it. Metrical evidence appears to be limited to cases in which a participle or predicate noun or adjective precedes a form of esse beginning with s-, thus confirming the prosodical distinctiveness of such a sequence. The evidence of sigmatic ecthlipsis thus ties in closely with that of contraction. The findings of the thesis have philological and editorial implications. First, they throw light on orthographic, phonetic, prosodic, and syntactic aspects of the verb ‘to be’ in Latin. It has a strong bond with the participle and predicate noun or adjective and may either be reduced phonetically in combination with such hosts, or participate in a simplification of -ss- which it may share with its host. Second, transmitted contracted spellings or readings betraying a misunderstanding of them should be given full consideration by editors and not disregarded. Contracted spellings might be restored in other conditions since manuscripts are often not trustworthy when transmitting uncontracted forms. Contracted forms may be stylistically motivated. They occur in comedy particularly in spoken metres, and in late Latin become a spelling archaism. Finally, sigmatic ecthlipsis in Terence occurs for certain only in restricted conditions: the editorial practice of printing it wherever it is possible even if not necessary is misleading.

No description available.

Cette recherche sur corpus a pour objet les emplois de quando (quandoque, quandoquidem, quandocumque) dans différents genres textuels du latin préclassique au latin postclassique. À partir du CD-ROM de la Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina nous avons répertorié les occurrences de quando dans les Comédies de Plaute, les Discours de Cicéron, le De rerum natura de Lucrèce, l’Histoire romaine de Tite-Live et les Traités philosophiques de Sénèque. En principe, le terme en kw- peut servir d’adverbe interrogatif, indéfini ou relatif et de conjonction temporelle ou causale. Or la distinction de ces différents emplois ne peut se faire à l’aide de procédés classificatoires qui prendraient comme cadre d’analyse maximal la phrase en raison d’ambiguïtés sémantiques et d’interférences fonctionnelles entre types de subordonnées. Aussi optons-nous pour une approche macro-syntaxique tenant compte des relations dépassant le segment phrastique et alliant les points de vue morpho-syntaxique et sémantico-énonciatif. D’abord, l’étude de quando, terme polyvalent susceptible de fonctionner à plusieurs niveaux de la structure phrastique, nous amène à nous interroger sur les niveaux d’insertion et la fonction de quando dans la phrase. Ainsi, les interférences fonctionnelles entre relatif et conjonction temporelle mettent en évidence la perméabilité des frontières entre fonctions syntaxiques. Ensuite, l’ambiguïté sémantique invite à dépasser le strict cadre phrastique et à considérer les inférences contextuelles du terme étudié en vue de distinguer notamment la valeur temporelle de la valeur causale de quando. Enfin, l’outil grammatical ne peut être appréhendé sans considération de sa valeur illocutoire. Par la grande diversité d’actes réalisés, l’analyse des emplois interrogatifs peut révéler certaines caractéristiques liées à l’écriture générique. Dans une approche empruntée à la grammaire fonctionnelle sera étudiée enfin la portée du terme au niveau du discours. Une telle analyse s’avère nécessaire pour caractériser l’emploi causal, dans la mesure où ce dernier intervient au niveau interpersonnel et non référentiel, et joue, dans la terminologie de la grammaire fonctionnelle, le rôle de satellite disjoint. En ce sens, cette étude prouve l’utilité d’une approche éclectique dans l’analyse des emplois de quando : le recours à différentes approches linguistiques, selon les besoins de l’interprétation, met en évidence la complémentarité des points de vue morpho-syntaxique et sémantico-pragmatique dans une description empirique des faits de langue et de discours visant à définir, à partir de données textuelles apparemment disparates, les valeurs de base des différents emplois de quando. L’intérêt de l’étude réside ainsi dans la polyvalence du terme, permettant d’aborder un large éventail de problèmes linguistiques voire extralinguistiques liés à la structure phrastique, au texte et à la situation de discours. / This corpus-based study analyses the use of quando (quandoque, quandoquidem, quandocumque) in different textual genres from Early to Postclassical Latin. From the Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina CD-ROM (BTL-4) we have listed the instances of quando in Plaute’s Comedies, Cicero’s Discourses, Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Livy’s History of Rome and Seneca’s Moral Essays. Quando can be used as an interrogative, indefinite and relative adverb or as a temporal or causal conjunction. But the classification of these different uses is not possible without a macro-syntactic approach that combines morpho-syntactic, semantic and enunciative points of view. First, the study of this multifunctional term raises the question of its integration in the sentence structure. Thus the functional interference of its use as a relative adverb and as a temporal conjunction shows that the frontiers between syntactical functions are malleable. Furthermore, the semantic ambiguity invites us to extend the analyses to the contextual inferences to distinguish for instance its temporal and causal use. Moreover we cannot analyse the use of quando without considering its illocutionary force: for instance the questions introduced by quando perform a great variety of speech acts which reveal certain characteristics of the literary genre. Finally, the methods of Functional Grammar are necessary to study the level quando affects in the sentence structure, as the causal subordinate clause provides information on the interpersonal level and can be considered as a disjunct satellite. In the light of these considerations, it is evident that an eclectic approach is necessary to study the use of quando: only different linguistic approaches, combining the morpho-syntactic, semantic and enunciative point of view in an empirical description of its occurrences, can define the value of the different uses of quando. Thus the significance of this study resides in the multifunctionality of quando which allows us to consider a large variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic problems occurring not only at multiple levels of the sentence structure, but extended even to the larger context of the speech interaction and intimately linked to the authors writing techniques and the speakers discursive intentions.