New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax: Syntax of the Sentence is the first of four volumes dealing with the long-term evolution of Latin syntax, roughly from the 4th century BCE up to the 6th century CE. There are six pivotal chapters in this volume, each dealing with a subject which is critical to the understanding of the syntactic system. Topics covered include contact phenomena (from Greek and Semitic), the development of word order, particles, coordination, and the syntax of questions and answers. The volume is introduced by the editors in an explanatory "Prolegomena", and the textual parameters are set in a chapter on literary genres and sociolinguistics. Crafted in a functional-typological framework, chapters are user-sensitive, with a minimum of technical jargon and formalism, making them accessible to the widest range of readers. Key features first publication to investigates the long-term syntactic history of Latin generally accessible to linguists and non-linguists theoretically coherent, formulated in functional-typological terms does not require reading fluency in Latin, since all examples are translated into English

Autorentext

Philip Baldi, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA; Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Bergamo University, Italy.

Klappentext

The New Historical Syntax of Latin is a methodologically uniform multi-authored work that traces main currents in the syntactic history of Latin. Relying primarily on a functional-typological methodology, in which structural considerations of the traditional type are combined in a complementary and balanced way with functional and typological principles, The New Historical Syntax of Latin approaches historical Latin syntax from a non-traditional perspective, investigating diachronic phenomena primarily from their discourse function as revealed in Latin texts.  A sample includes the origins and development of participant-tracking in discourse, deixis, the use and function of sentence-connectives, the shift from "be" to "have" expressions to mark predicative possession, and changes in word order, to name but a few.

Zusammenfassung

This is the first of a multi-volume set dealing with the long-term evolution of Latin syntax, roughly from the 4th century BCE up to the 6th century CE. There are six pivotal chapters in this volume, each dealing with a subject which is critical to the understanding of the syntactic system. Topics covered include contact phenomena (from Greek and Semitic), the development of word order, particles, coordination, and the syntax of questions and answers. The volume is introduced by the editors in an explanatory "Prolegomena", and the textual parameters are set in a chapter on literary genres and sociolinguistics. Crafted in a functional-typological framework, chapters are user-sensitive, with a minimum of technical jargon and formalism, making them accessible to the widest range of readers.