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<p>Manatees (Mammalia: Sirenia), along with the closely related dugongs, are the only herbivorous marine mammals. Manatees consume a wide variety of vascular plants and algae in both marine and freshwater habitats. However, little is known about what characteristics influence diet and food selectivity, especially in freshwater habitats, which represent a large portion of the available habitat for the endangered Antillean manatee, <italic>Trichechus manatus manatus</italic>, in Central and South America. Understanding foraging ecology is an important element of effective conservation strategies.</p><p>This dissertation investigated various aspects of the foraging ecology of the Antillean manatee in a freshwater habitat, specifically: 1) how plant availability (i.e. species richness, diversity, and abundance) varied seasonally with changes in water depths, 2) manatee food selectivity from a representative set of plant species from that freshwater habitat, and 3) the relationship of plant nutritive compounds and availability with manatee food selectivity. In addition, this dissertation describes the multiple uses of sonar technology for studying manatees and habitat characteristics in freshwater.</p><p>Plant availability to manatees was evaluated by conducting monthly plant surveys from July 2010-July 2011 in four contact lakes in the wetlands of Tabasco, Mexico. Manatee food selectivity was examined by conducting food selection experiments on a wild adult manatee during the low water season with 54 plant species representing 25+ genera. The nutritive components (i.e. crude protein (CP), neutral detergent fiber (NDF), acid detergent fiber (ADF), hemicellulose (HC), and ash) and plant availability values for selected and non-selected plants species were evaluated to determine their relationship with manatee food selectivity. The applicability of using side-scan sonar for manatee research was tested in various freshwater and estuarine habitats in Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and the wetlands of Tabasco, Mexico between 2006-2011.</p><p>The major findings of this dissertation are as follows. Plant species richness, diversity, and abundance were greatest during the rising water season (July-August) and lowest during the low water season (March-June). No plants were available in April-June, which represented the majority of the low water season. The wild manatee</p><p>selected 27 (11+ genera) of the 54 species examined during the feeding experiments. Of the plant characteristics tested (i.e. nutritive components and plant availability), only digestible fiber (HC) was significantly related to manatee food selection, with manatees</p><p>selecting plants with higher HC content. Four unique applications were identified for the use of side-scan sonar to facilitate manatee research in freshwater habitats: 1) confirmation of visual sightings and determination of group size, 2) determination of mother-calf pairs, 3) habitat characterization, and 4) assisting manatee captures.</p><p>Results from this study reveal that manatees living in the freshwater wetlands of Tabasco, Mexico have to cope with a highly seasonal availability of plants and that while manatees consume plants from a wide variety of genera, they are highly selective. Unlike other herbivorous mammals, manatee food selectivity was not influenced by CP, NDF, or ADF, but rather by digestible fiber. A unique suit of anatomical and physiological characteristics suggests that manatees may be fiber digestion specialists. Both seasonal plant availability and the manatee's large dietary breadth must be considered when developing 1) conservation strategies for wild manatees in freshwater habitats and 2) protocols for captive rehabilitation of orphaned and stranded manatees that will be reintroduced into the wild.</p> / Dissertation

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.

The vast majority of work on question formation examines interrogatives from the perspective of just one single component of grammar, usually the syntax or the prosody. The present dissertation offers a comprehensive account of question formation addressing both the syntax and the prosody of interrogatives and the interaction between these two components of grammar in signalling the question meaning of an utterance. The present work examines question formation on the basis of four genealogically related and geographically closely located Romance varieties spoken in northern Italy: Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes. Given that these varieties differ only with respect to certain microparametric values whereas others remain constant, they constitute an ideal research area to study the interaction between the syntax and the prosody in question formation. The syntactic and prosodic analyses proposed are based on new empirical data. The syntactic analysis is couched within the cartographic approach and the prosodic analysis is based on Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. This dissertation is motivated by five main research goals: <ol type=i><li>to provide a detailed description of the syntactic variation found in interrogatives in the four varieties Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes based on data collected by the author;</li> <li>to propose a unified syntactic analysis of the interrogatives;</li> <li>to offer a prosodic analysis of statements and questions providing new data from varieties not studied up to now in the literature;</li> <li>to establish the relation between the syntax and the prosody in question formation;</li> <li>to determine how the syntax and the prosody interact in providing clues to interrogative force for the listener as well as the speaker.</li></ol> The main conclusions are as follows: The syntactic structure and the intonational tune are autonomous in question formation. Three aspects matter for interrogative clause typing: (i) syntactic marking, (ii) prosodic marking and (iii) tune-text-alignment.

The thesis consists of detailed commentary on the first 201 lines of Catullus 64, together with an edited text and apparatus criticus. It represents about half a planned commentary on the whole poem, which will also include an introduction. The commentary begins by discussing the poem’s Argonautic opening, its use of allusion to negotiate generic relationships with epic and tragedy, and its exploration of narrative, pictorial and first-person ‘lyric’ modes. As the narrative jumps to Peleus’ wedding, the commentary examines the complicated moral signals about Roman luxury and the golden age sent by the description of the gleaming palace surrounded by abandoned fields. The transition to the description of Ariadne prompts an examination of how this ‘disobedient’ ecphrasis emphasises details that a picture could not literally convey, together with an analysis of the male narrator’s objectifying presentation of a woman in distress. The ecphrasis proper is then disrupted by a ‘flashback’ covering Ariadne’s first encounter with Theseus and his fight with the Minotaur: the commentary explores the ways in which shifting focalisation complicates the reader’s judgement of Theseus’ heroism. Finally, the thesis looks at Ariadne’s speech as an intertextual node, investigating the meanings generated by its relationships with other speeches from both earlier and later in Greek and Roman poetic traditions, and examining how each theme or topos is used in this particular situation both by the alluding poet and by Ariadne herself. More discursive notes introducing the various sections are interspersed with shorter lemmata considering textual, metrical, linguistic and cultural-historical issues as well as literary interpretation. The commentary aims both to open up the possibilities of meaning offered by individual words and phrases, and to advance critical understanding of key aspects of the whole poem, such as its narratorial voice, engagement with visuality and place in literary history.

I examine how religion is presented in the Annals of Tacitus, and how it resonates with and adds complexity to the larger themes of the historian’s narrative. Memory is essential to understanding the place of religion in the narrative, for Tacitus constructs a picture of a Rome with ‘religious amnesia.’ The Annals are populated with characters, both emperors and their subjects, who fail to maintain the traditional religious practices of their forebears by neglecting prodigies and omens, committing impious murders, and even participating in the destruction of Rome’s sacred buildings. Alongside this forgetfulness of traditional religious practice runs the construction of a new memory – that of the deified Augustus – which leads to the veneration of living emperors in terms appropriate to gods. This religious narrative resonates with and illuminates Tacitean observations on the nature of power in imperial Rome. Furthermore, tracing the prominence of religious memory in the text improves our understanding of how Tacitus thinks about the past, and particularly how he thinks about the role of the historian in shaping memory for his readers. I consider various religious categories and their function in Tacitus’ writings, and how his characters interact with them: calendars (do Tacitus’ Romans preserve or change the traditional scheduling of festivals?), architecture (what determines the building of or alterations to temples and other religious monuments?), liturgy (do they worship in the same ways their ancestors did?), and images (how do they treat cult statues?). I analyze the patterns of behaviour, both in terms of ritual practice and in how Tacitus’ characters think about and interpret the supernatural, and consider how Rome’s religious past features in these patterns. The thesis is structured according to the reigns of individual emperors. Four chapters chart Tiberius’ accession, Germanicus’ death, its aftermath, and Sejanus’ rise to power; one chapter examines the religious antiquarian Claudius; and the final chapter analyzes Nero’s impieties and their consequences.

Chapter 1, 2 of the Noctes Atticae reports how the orator and politician Herodes Atticus silences a boastful young Stoic by citing a diatribe of Epictetus. The article shows that Gellius – unlike his own assertion – does not describe a real experience. Instead he dramatizes the text (Epict. diss. 2, 19), which is the origin of the citation. Comparing both texts one finds details of the scenery described, the characterizations of the protagonists as well as the themes discussed quite similar in both the non-cited parts of Epictetus and the text of Gellius. Particularly interesting in that respect is how Gellius takes up citing and its various aspects as it can be found in his model. Epictetus deals with this theme in a critical way, because in his opinion citations of authorities say nothing about the philosophical qualities of the person who uses them. While Gellius’ praxis of citation is formally modelled very closely on Epictetus’ speech, regarding the content he by no means rejects the use of philosophical citations as weapon to beat an opponent in discussion.

No comprehensive study of the manuscripts of Macrobius' Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis has appeared in print since the edition of Ludwig von Jan in 1848, although in the 1950s A. la Penna published valuable articles in which he announced the importance of the two 9th-cent. manuscripts, Paris lat. 6370 and Paris lat. 16677. The surviving medieval manuscripts of the Commentary, with or without a separate text of the Somnium Scipionis itself, number around 230 - the figure includes fragments but not excerpts. The total for the Saturnalia is just under 100. The Commentary and the Saturnalia are rarely found written together in one manuscript, and the two manuscript traditions are almost entirely separate. The work summed up in the thesis is based on detailed 'codicological' descriptions and collations of sample passages for about 150 out of the total of c. 230 manuscripts of the Commentary. An attempt has been made to apply the skills of the palaeographer and historian of medieval libraries equally with those of the textual critic in extracting palaeographical and textual evidence from a manuscript treated as a whole. The aim of the work is to discover what the manuscripts themselves can contribute towards the history of Macrobius' text in the Middle Ages, and to distinguish families of manuscripts as a preliminary to the establishing of the text. By the beginning of the 12th cent., it is broadly true to say that a 'vulgate' text of Macrobius' Commentary had been established; the tradition by then was so heavily contaminated that the general impression given by later manuscripts is one of total eclecticism. The later manuscripts do not fall into any major divisions, and only occasionally into identifiable localised groups. Although the 150 manuscripts analysed are from all periods, it has been decided to restrict the thesis to the earlier manuscripts, up to the end of the 11th cent. Here two important families of manuscripts can be discerned, which I have christened 'the Φ group' and 'manuscripts of the abbreviated form'. These account for the majority of surviving manuscripts up to c. 1100, but there is still a residue which are difficult to classify. It would be wrong to say that these remaining manuscripts form a third family, for their only common element lies in the fact that they do not belong to one of the two groups. Although I have the information about these manuscripts at hand, I have largely ignored them in the thesis in order to concentrate on those which belong to recognisable families. The thesis falls into two parts. Pt.I consists of chapters in which the ideas suggested by the combination of textual and palaeographical information are elaborated. Pt. II contains full descriptions of most of the major manuscripts discussed in Pt. I. These descriptions are not intended as reading-matter, but as a corpus of reference material to illustrate the background of facts and detailed research on which the speculations of Pt. I are based; they incude a number of discoveries about indivisual manuscripts, e.g. the re-connecting of several sets of membra disiecta. Because of problems of space, it has been decided to tender full descriptions of a limited number of manuscripts rather than summary descriptions of them all; those included represent only a sample of the total work done. In Pt. I, chapter I concerns the subscription of Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, consul of A.D. 485. The implications of the subscription for the very early history of the text are first discussed, and a small piece of new evidence which may possibly have a bearing on the nationality of Macrobius is brought forward. The nine manuscripts which contain the subscription are then listed and analysed, with a view to finding out whether any of them may be direct descendants of the copy corrected by Aurelius Memmius Symmachus. For six of them it is demonstrated that the subscription must have been an addition, either in these manuscripts themselves or in their immediate ancestors; there remain three which may descend from Symmachus' copy. Finally, it is suggested that the ancient manuscript itself survived the Dark Ages, and passed from Ravenna before 485 to the circle of Lupus of Ferrières between 859 and 862; a parallel is drawn between the histories of the ancient copy of Macrobius' Commentary and the miscellany of Rusticus Helpidius Domnulua which was the exemplar of Vat. lat. 4929, and was used by Lupus and his pupil Heiric of Auxerre. Chapter II concerns the oldest surviving manuscript of the Commentary, Paris lat. 6370 (s.ix⅓, ?Tours), and opens with a discussion of the manuscript as it originally stood before correction. C.H. Beeson identified the hand of Lupus in some 9th-cent. corrections; an attempt is made to confirm the suggestion of É. Pellegrin that another 9th-cent. hand which makes additions in the manuscript can be identified as that of Heiric. Chapters III-V concern the Φ group of manuscripts. In ch. III, the three 9th-cent. manuscripts are analysed with regard to provenance and textual relationships. Two are from Fleury, one from Corbie. The discovery that Reg. lat. 1587, fols.65-80, containing a 9th-cent. copy of De senectute, is from the same manuscript as Paris lat. 16677 (Macrobius' Commentary) introduces the definition of a 9th-cent. corpus, Cato de senectute cum Macrobio, which incorporated the Φ strain of Macrobius' text. The chapter ends by tracing the Insular background of Φ. Ch. IV concerns the later descendants of the 9th-cent. Fleury manuscripts, and it is shown that Macrobius was copied and read with great attention at Fleury under Abbo at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries. Ch. V deals with the members of the Φ group written in Germany, and shows that the 9th-cent. Corbie manuscript, Paris nouv. acq. lat. 454, had two 11-th cent. German descendants. Ch. VI deals with an abbreviated form of the Macrobius' text, containing the mainly astronomical section from I.14, 21 to II.9, 10, found in many German manuscripts of the 10th and 11th centuries. But the earliest manuscript was written in France (Berne 347, fols 1r - 22r, ? Auxerre, s.ix²); a codicological argument is put forward that Berne 347 shows marks of editorial manipulation and is therefore the archetype of the group. The conclusion is that the earliest manuscripts of Macrobius' Commentary were written in the French centres such as Tours, Fleury, and in them can be detected the signs of an Insular pre-history. Although the tradition is heavily contaminated, the definition of the two major groups should help us to establish the text on a new basis.

Thesis (doctoral--Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1996). / Includes bibliographical references (pt. 1, p. 499-553) and indexes.

Thesis (doctoral--Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1996). / Includes bibliographical references (pt. 1, p. 499-553) and indexes.