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In her critical edition of the Passio Nazarii, Celsi, Geruasii et Protasii (BHL 6043), a text dated to the 6th or 7th century AD and probably translated from Greek, Cecile Lanéry introduces several conjectural changes aimed at language standardization. The author of the present article takes issue with several of her conjectures and suggests that in each case the transmitted text actually stands criticism and should probably be left unchanged. At 2.3, the transmitted alapas is not to be changed to alapis with percutio, since percutio with both the accusative of direct object and the accusative of a word meaning “blow” is several times reliably attested in the Vetus Latina, and in one of these instances the word used for “blow” is actually alapa. At 5.1, et in the expression uocans Nazarium et dixit ei should not be deleted, since there are numerous parallels for this syntax in Late Latin. At 8.2, in carcerem is to be retained as a possible way to describe position in Late Latin, whether confusion of expressions denoting position and direction or hypercorrect graphic -m is at issue. At 12.1, the form imperatori is to be retained as a possible orthographic variant for the ablative in Late Latin

The article concerns the semantic nuances of the verb faxo in the Plautus’ language. The vast majority of the occurrences demonstrate causative semantics, but there are a few cases where such a meaning can hardly be seen. De Melo singled out the two occurrences in which faxo can be treated as either an adverb similar to forsitan or a parenthetical expression with the meaning “I assume.” The author of the article has found some more examples of the non-causative use of faxo and tried to find out which of De Melo’s suggestions is preferable. On the grounds of the grammaticalization principles suggested by Hopper and Heine, there has been traced the stages of grammaticalization of faxo in the language of Roman comedy, with particular attention to the broader context. It is demonstrated that the causative meaning which transpires in many examples tends to emerge in the “bridging contexts” of grammaticalization, while the transition to the semantics under consideration occurs at the following stage, i. e. in the “switch context”. Having analyzed all the occurrences of faxo against the broader contexts and comparative data from other languages, the author concludes that the rare sigmatic future faxo had over time become a semi-grammaticalized marker of the speaker’s stance, which allowed both evidential (inferential) and modal-epistemic interpretation

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

This article offers a linguistic commentary on the verse Verg. Aen. 9. 427 me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, in which the personal pronoun in the accusative needs interpretation. Since the time of Servius and Donatus, the opinions of commentators have been divided. Servius and his followers believe that the pronoun in the accusative is a direct complement that depends on an implied (omitted) verb like interficite, occidite, or petite, and consider this place as a rhetorical figure of aposiopesis. Donatus, on the other hand, argues that the accusative me, me is independent, while discontinuous intonation with which the whole verse must be uttered emphasizes the extreme degree of despair of Nisus, who cannot prevent the death of his beloved friend Euryalus. A review of the commentaries on the Aeneid shows that there are slightly more supporters of Donatus’ hypothesis than that of Servius’, but all of their reasoning is intuitive and does not explain why it is the syntactically independent accusative that gives the agitated sounding to Nisus’ last words. The author of the article applies the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of this place, analyzing similar examples of “non-syntactic” use of the accusative and considering both traditional and modern views on this phenomenon. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the verse under consideration corresponds to what in modern linguistics is called “cleft construction”. Such constructions exist in different languages and serve to express the focus of contrast. At the end of the study, the author attempts to answer the question of why Latin employs the accusative as a tool to express intense emotions

The article discusses the origins of four Neo-Latin animal names, denoting a beetle, a bird, a fish and a mollusk, coined by the Greek scholar Theodore Gaza in the third quarter of the fifteenth century: two neologisms of form, or proper neologisms, gal(l)eruca and gallinago, and two neologisms of sense, cernua ‘inclined forwards, head foremost’ and patella ‘plate, pan’. These words, still valid in today’s zoological nomenclature, were first introduced in Gaza’s Latin version of Aristotle’s Historia animalium, where they stood, respectively, for μηλολόνθη, σκολόπαξ/ἀσκαλώπας, ὀρφώς/ὀρφός and λεπάς. Apparently, they owe their existence to Gaza’s acquaintance with Italian dialectal vocabulary, as can be deduced from two sixteenthcentury sources: Agostino Nifo’s commentary to Aristotle’s zoological writings and Ippolito Salviani’s encyclopedic work on aquatic animals. Gaza’s galleruca must have originated from the Lombard galeruca ‘rose chafer’ (the identification of μηλολόνθη with the latter probably due to the hapax legomenon χρυσομηλολόνθιον, Ar. Vesp. 1341), gallinago from the Emilian gallinazza ‘woodcock’ (since the only known characteristic of σκολόπαξ/ἀσκαλώπας is that it is similar to a hen, Arist. Hist. an. 617b24), cernua from the Calabrian cerna/cernia (identified with ὀρφώς/ὀρφός either due to Gaza’s use of a bilingual glossary or due to his own experience in the Calabrian bilingual milieu) and patella from the Calabrian or Roman patella ‘pan; limpet’ (perhaps identified with λεπάς because Gaza kept in mind the name of a vessel, λεπαστή/ λεπάστη, considered deriving from λεπάς by Eustathius). All the said dialects correspond to the Italian regions where Gaza spent parts of his life

This piece studies the Portuguese version of the so-called Notarial Latin, the Latin of medieval documents. The author briefly overviews the reasons why these written records have been scarcely explored — the low availability of texts, the unreliability of existing editions and the perception of Notarial Latin as a corrupted language. The chronological framework of Notarial Latin, its correlation with Late and Medieval Latin and its sociolinguistic peculiarities are described. It is suggested to primarily focus on the morphosyntax of Notarial Latin. The results of the analysis of eighteen texts created between 1033 and 1183 are then presented followed by the analysis of various deviations from the grammatical norm of Latin caused by the interference of Galician-Portuguese. In nominals, there is a violation of the norms for the use of some prepositions (foremost, the preposition de). The case system generally remains. In the verb system, the regular use of Latin Futurum II in the function of the Portuguese Futuro de Conjuntivo which developed on its basis is evident. However, contrary to expectations, there are practically no traces of Romance verb analyticity. On the syntactic level, there is a tendency towards the SVO word order. The frequent cases of Romance interference indicate supposedly the most profound transformations that took place during the formation of Galician-Portuguese from vernacular Latin. It is concluded that the study of Notarial Latin is promising for a contrastive typology of Latin and Romance languages

In this paper, the Latin language is analyzed in the context of typology of object incorporation. The authors draw on the research of Mithun, who considers incorporation on the basis of two obligatory conditions: first, the noun must be embedded in the verb, and second, the language must have parallel syntactic paraphrases with non-incorporated noun. The second criterion is so important that the phenomenon of incorporation is acknowledged to exist even in those languages where there is no complete integration of the noun into the verb, but only a certain syntactic compactness, provided there are parallel constructions. The latter type has been coined “noun stripping” and has launched the division of incorporation into two types, viz. “strong” and “weak” incorporation. Another important point of divergence between the incorporating languages is the change of the argument structure of the source verb, namely, the preservation or loss of transitivity of the incorporated complex. Taking all these parameters into account, the authors propose a new typology of object incorporation, including languages that have not previously been considered in the context of this phenomenon. This typology is not based on a strict opposition of incorporating and non-incorporating languages, but represents a kind of continuum in which the place of a language depends on whether it demonstrates: 1) full incorporation or only a close syntactic Noun–Verb compactness; 2) the presence of parallel syntactic paraphrases; 3) the detransitivisation of the resulting compound verb. The authors examine each criterion in detail as applied to Latin and show the place of Latin in this typology

This paper offers a comprehensive and critical review of the most significant studies on the possible alternation between two specific encodings that can express, in a generic sense, the Manner in which a verbal process is developed: adverbial expressions (ADV) and Secondary Predicates (SP). The main types of SP/ADV to be addressed here are those which are Subject and/or event oriented. Both general and typological works will be taken into account, as well as others more focused on the Latin language; the central criterion of the study will essentially be to distinguish and analyse approaches which are more or less favourable to seeing the two types of constituents as equivalent. A section devoted to the work of one of the Latinists who has contributed most specifically and notably to the issue under discussion (H. Pinkster) will also be included. Following a critical review of the criteria which have the greatest explanatory potential for explaining the issue, some analytical approaches will be proposed which are as objective as possible for a subsequent corpus study; these criteria include parameters pertaining to different linguistic levels: syntax, lexical-semantics, pragmatics, etc.: their application — here only tentatively discussed — will provide clear and measurable results on the problem and on those questions arising from the critical review itself.

The results of a comparative study of verb forms with aspectual semantics in Ancient Greek (Koine) (which has an overt category of aspect) and Latin (where aspect is rather a covert category), based on the Gospel of Mark, have shown that the expected correspondence of verb forms appears to be standard in the material as well: it is found in the majority of cases (97,6 % of the Ancient Greek Aorist translated by the Latin Perfect, and 89,4 % of the Ancient Greek Imperfect/ Present translated by the Latin Imperfect). Therefore, there must be a considerable semantic overlap between the Ancient Greek Aorist and the Latin Perfect forms and between the Ancient Greek Imperfect/Present forms and the Latin Imperfect forms. For each pair, there must be a common semantic core, corresponding in the first case to the perfective, and in the second case to the imperfective viewpoints. In the minority of cases, we find deviations from this standard correspondence. Some of them can be explained by the trivial fact that the context allows freedom in the choice of the aspectual viewpoint. However, in several cases, the discrepancies are not accidental and can be explained by the existence of specific differences between the grammatical systems of two languages. These include iterative contexts and contexts with speech verbs

A large group of adjectives in Apicius’ De re coquinaria is formed with the suffix -atus. Although they contain a suffix which is typical of the perfect participle, their base is not verbal, but nominal: this is their peculiarity. They are all adjectives referring to food; their meaning is possessing “the quality/condition expressed by the base-noun” (e. g. Apic. 8. 7. 14 liquamen piperatum). Many of them are Apicius’ creations and attested only in his cooking book (e. g. allecatum, coriandratus, syringiatus); a great number of them have a Greek origin. This paper proposes not only a semantic analysis of denominal adjectives with the suffix -atus, but also a comparison with adjectives ending in -osus, which have the meaning “full of ”. The formations in -atus of De re coquinaria are also examined according to the qualia theory, the principles of which are clearly recognisable in these adjectives. Apicius’ denominal adjectives in -atus can be compared to suffixed adjectives in some modern languages (Italian -ato, Spanish -ado, French -é), which express the concept of possession of a quality, and which derive from a noun, not from a verb, although they are formally identical to past participle, as it happens in Latin

This article compares the use of two similar ways of expressing relative future tense in Latin: the future passive infinitive and the construction fore/futurum (esse) ut. This construction is regularly found in the same contexts as the future infinitives, and may serve as an alternative for verbs lacking a supine form. What appears to be of particular interest is its widespread use in cases where a supine is available, and the future infinitive could have been used. Up to the present day, there have been very few studies on this topic. In the present study, the author aims to fill this gap and to examine the relevant syntactic constructions in the passive voice, to begin with a limited corpus of examples. Cicero’s texts were chosen as the material for the study, since they preserve the largest number of these forms, furthermore, such material allows us to conduct the study within the language of one author. The study was conducted with the help of the computer database PHI-5. Having examined the resulting sample, the author identifies tendencies typical for the use of the infinitive and the construction, as well as their pragmatic features and differences. The infinitive is used in objective contexts with a high degree of epistemic support and, as a rule, when there are valid reasons to believe that a certain event will happen. The fore ut construction in our corpus is chosen either to denote the events that were not destined to happen or to convey someone else’s opinion, and introduces a subjective and sometimes counterfactual overtone into the embedded predication. The set of verbs that occur as future infinitives and those used in the predication embedded under fore ut does not overlap, with few exceptions, which may be due to the different aspectual characteristics of these verbs.