This article attempts to provide an interpretation of a passage on the noun number written by the 5th-century grammarian Cledonius who composed a lemmatised commentary on Donatus’ Ars minor and Ars maior. The passage discussed here is a part of the explanation regarding the noun categories in Ars minor: Numerus, qui unum et plures demonstrat: et communis est numerus, qui et dualis dicitur apud Graecos, ut species facies res. (GL V 10. 19–20). Cledonius’ text confuses two terms dualis and communis, which normally signify different linguistic phenomena. Tim Denecker, whose article covers the history of the term dualis in Latin grammatical treatises, argues that dualis in this passage is indicating a pair and is equated to communis. The aim of the present work is to explain why these two terms have been confused. When comparing Greek and Latin, the Roman grammarians Charisius, Diomedes, Priscian, and Macrobius highlighted the absence of the dual number from Latin, whereas Donatus added it to the singular and plural exemplifying it with two nomina — duo and ambo. Having analysed all of Cledonius’ passages on dualis and communis and compared them with the original text of Donatus, one may notice that Cledonius did not make comments on Donatus’ observations concerning the dual number of duo and ambo. In the author’s view, the grammarian may have opined that the Latin language had no dual number at all, so that in his commentary Latin communis is juxtaposed to Greek dualis and both are opposed to singular and plural
This article aims to put Latin impersonal passive into the context of covert categories, specifically pluractionality. I try to reanalyse six passages from the Roman grammatical texts, mostly compiled in Heinrich Keil’s Grammatici Latini, in which the meaning of Latin impersonal passives is considered. There are two groups of evidence. The first one (passages from Diomedes, Priscian, and frg. Bobiense de verbo) presents the impersonal passive as a linguistic strategy that shifts focus from an agent to a situation, while the second one (Diomedes and two excerpts of Servius’ commentaries on Virgil) concentrates upon the number of agents. In the last case, a verbal action is considered to be a collective one involving many people, and therefore, in my opinion, falls into the category of pluractionality. Being a diverse phenomenon, the term pluractionality includes participant plurality, which is realised either in a subject or in an object depending on whether the verb is intransitive or transitive. Intransitivity of the Latin impersonal passive forms, as it seems, may imply agent plurality rather than subject plurality, since impersonal passive constructions are subjectless. Furthermore, in my opinion, the evidence provided by Latin grammarians demonstrates a contraposition of the 1 st person singular, 1 st person plural and 3rd person singular passive forms
The article aims to analyze the use of the term concessivus/concessiva ‘concessive’ in Latin grammatical texts which make up Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum and Digital Library of late antique Latin texts, and to consider the concessive meaning as a grammatical category. A number of grammatical sources (Probus, Ars of Diomedes, Victorini sive Palaemoni Ars, Ars of Cledonius, Explanationes) place the category of concessivity among the verbal categories, namely modus ‘mood’, while in others this term is not mentioned. The text of Diomedes is also notable for the fact that concessivity is included in the concept of species, a term that includes heterogeneous grammatical phenomena among Roman grammarians. At the same time, the grammarian identifies not one meaning of concession, but two, which are defined by the terms — species concessiva (describes situations that are undesirable for the speaker in the present and future) and species affirmativa (describes situations that did not actually happen). All the three terms in the title of this paper correspond to coniunctivus concessivus and indicate the same grammatical form — perfect subjunctive, e. g. feceris ‘even if you did’. In modern linguistics, the meaning of concession is expressed not only by the perfect subjunctive, but also by the present subjunctive, and, thus, does not have a unique formal expression, as in ancient linguistics. I suppose that concession in the Latin language falls under the scope of covert grammatical category, whereas concession, as it was presented in Roman grammars, can be treated as an overt one