Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Although there are today no longer native speakers of Latin, there is quite a lot we know about this language, and this is of course due to the fact that there is a very substantial body of Latin texts that has come down to us. In this talk I will discuss what the present-day linguist can and cannot do with this text corpus. I will start by giving an overview of the electronical resources that are nowadays available. Special attention will be paid to the nature of different types of texts, and to the extent to which we can expect these texts to accurately reflect the ‘real’ language, as it was spoken on a day-to-day basis, and acquired by young children.

            The empirical focus of the talk is on word order. As is well known, Latin word order is very flexible, and the language is sometimes cited as a prototypical case of a so-called ‘non-configurational’ language, i.e. a language whose syntax is not characterized by hierarchical structures. Importantly however, even in Latin there are some very robust and non-accidental restrictions on possible word order permutations, as discussed at length in Danckaert (2017) (The Development of Latin Clause Structure: A Study of the Extended Verb Phrase. Oxford: OUP). I will argue that these restrictions can only be explained in a satisfactory manner if one assumes that the language is indeed configurational.