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THE СONSTRUCTION FORE UT VS INFINITIVUS FUTURI PASSIVI IN CICERO (2025)
Выпуск: Т. 20 № 1 (2025)
Авторы: Лоскина Мария Алексеевна

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.

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