Date: 12-Jul-2011
From: Joseph Reisdoerfer <joseph.reisdoerferci.rech.lu>
Subject: Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-1700.html
AUTHOR: Olga Spevak TITLE: Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 117 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2010
Dr Joseph Reisdoerfer, Professeur à l'Athénée, Professeur associé à l'Université du Luxembourg
INTRODUCTION This book on constituent order in Classical Latin prose by Olga Spevak (OS) comes from a 2006 habilitation supervised by Professor Michèle Fruyt (University of Paris IV Sorbonne). The volume is characterized by clarity in structure and formulation of ideas.
SUMMARY The book is divided into eight parts: an introduction, six chapters on word order in Classical Latin prose, and a conclusion.
The introduction (pp. 1-12) sketches different approaches to Latin word order: the traditional approach, related to comparative grammar; the typological approach based on research done by Greenberg (1966) -- Latin is characterized by a basic SOV order; the generative approach adopted by Devine and Stephens (2006); and finally, the pragmatic approaches illustrated by Panhuis (1982) based on Firbas (1992) and especially by Dik (1997) -- Functional Grammar. The last distinguishes between two main pragmatic functions, topic, 'what is being talked about' (pp. 6-7) and focus (pp. 7-8), the ''salient, or most informative, element of a sentence'' (pp. 7-8).
Starting from a pragmatic framework the author provides a systematic description of constituent order in Classical Latin prose highlighting the information (i.e. the pragmatic value) contained in a sentence (pp. 1, 11-12, 27). The study is based on different corpora (as discussed below).
The first chapter (pp. 13-26) deals with freedom of and constraints on Latin constituent order. It focuses, for example, on the position of subordinators -- often first position -- or enclitics, as in Lat. enim, autem, vero, which are found in second position.
In the second chapter (pp. 27-114), the author details the key concepts of her approach, namely:
1. topic, 'what is being talked about', often found in first position in a sentence (pp. 28-31; on different kinds of topics, cf. pp. 56-73); 2. the focus, the salient, or most informative element of a sentence (pp. 39-56); 3. situational and contextual dependency, a notion borrowed from Firbas (1992) and Panhuis (1982); according to Spevak (p. 32), ''a constituent is dependent if it is inferable from the discourse situation or is mentioned in the preceding context''; 4. placement of pronouns (pp. 73-96); 5. ellipsis (pp. 96-106), which usually affects elements without pragmatic function; 6. theme constituents which specify an entity on which relevant information will be given in the subsequent clause, e.g. *That guy*, is he a friend of yours? (pp. 107-111); 7. tail constituents which stand at the end of a clause and add some information to elements of the clause or to the whole content of the clause, as I didn't like it very much, *that book of yours* (pp. 111-114).
The third chapter (pp. 115-193) analyses verb position and its mandatory arguments in declarative sentences. It is arranged around different verb valencies: bivalent transitive verbs and trivalent verbs.
OS makes many stimulating observations; but a particular pragmatic value doesn't seem to be attached to a given structure (e.g., p. 125) and no general rules emerge from the cases studies. It is, however, noteworthy that the verb is often found at the end of a sentence.
The fourth chapter discusses different types of interrogative sentences: word questions, sentence questions and disjunctive questions (pp. 195-204). This time the author formulates a set of clear position rules: questions words are generally found in initial position; interrogative particles (Lat. ne, num, nonne) usually occupy initial position, Lat. an always does; sentence-questions without interrogative particles present three structures: initial position may be held by the verb which represents the focus, by a contrastive element or an emphatic word such as Lat. tantus.
In chapter five (pp. 205-222), OS examines imperative sentences. She qualifies the commonly accepted theory of sentence-initial position of imperatives by observing that topic constituents may occupy this position (p. 221).
The last chapter is devoted to noun phrases (pp. 223-281). OS examines among others the placement of a series of modifiers such as adjectives, demonstratives, indefinites, genitive complements; the last section deals with the discontinuity of noun phrases, the hyperbaton.
In her conclusion (pp. 280-281), the author observes that in a neutral context adjectives are found after the head noun, whereas determiners are usually placed before it. Noun phrases which function as topics often have pre-nominal adjectives and determiners. Genitive complements expressing contextually given information are in pre-nominal position, whereas those providing new information are usually placed post nomen.
A general conclusion (pp. 283-285), a bibliography (pp. 287-297), locorum and rerum indices (pp. 299-301) and an appendix (pp. 305-318) presenting three texts commented on from a pragmatic perspective conclude the book.
EVALUATION My overall impression of this volume is quite positive. The very complexity of the subject does of course leave room for discussion or may explain certain weaknesses.
The most disappointing pages in my view are those devoted to declarative sentences (pp. 115-193). The conclusions often remain too general and vague as e.g. on page 159: "To sum up ... the placement of verbs of thinking before or after the AcI clause they govern is difficult to explain. In a more general way, there is a tendency for postposition of the verb, even if it does not have Focus function. ... More detailed research in the domain of complex sentences needs to be done in order to formulate more nuanced conclusions." (see also pp. 125, 144, 160 ...). The author sometimes makes interesting remarks or gives an accurate and fine description of some particular points (the study of the Lat. verb mitto, to send, pp. 132-141), but she never succeeds in identifying the general principles that underlie the system: "I will not ... try to determine the so-called 'basic order' of the Latin sentence, for it is difficult -- indeed impossible -- to reduce the complex facts to a simple formula. ... My aim is to describe which pragmatic values correspond to the syntactic patterns one finds. In fact, there is no one-to-one correspondence between syntactic patterns and pragmatic values ... " (pp. 115-116). The pragmatic approach, focusing too much on the text, on parole and not on langue, may show its limits here. A mixed approach, based not only on pragmatics but also on typological considerations (Greenberg 1966; Adams 1976), as it has been successfully applied in a study by Brigitte L. Bauer (2009), would probably have yielded more satisfying results.
The use of linguistic corpora is also problematic. The author bases her study on four corpora: Corpus 1 (Cicero, Caesar, Sallust) and 2 (same authors, for details, cf. pp. 12, 287) compiled by the author herself, along with two external corpora, the BTL 1 and the LASLA corpus of the University of Liège, Belgium (http://www.cipl.ulg.ac.be/Lasla/descriptionop.html). Corpora 1 and 2 are limited (84,000 and 92,010 words) and heterogeneous. For Cicero, e.g., we have the language of philosophical treatises, of orations, but also of letters, which is often closer to spoken Latin. These corpora are not adequately described: what editions were the texts taken from, why were those texts chosen and others excluded, what software was used to compile, manage and investigate the corpora, etc.?
A consistent implementation of protocols governing corpus building would have enabled the author not only to refine but also to differentiate the results from the point of view of literary genre -- does the formal language of philosophical treatises display a different word order than the informal language of private letters? -- and, most importantly, time, -- does the word order of the Classical Latin written by Cicero and Caesar remain the same in the postclassical language of Seneca the Philosopher and Pliny the Younger?
These criticisms, however, do not detract from the overall quality of this study. I mentioned at the outset the clarity of structure and formulation of ideas found here, e.g. in chapter four (pp. 195-204) dealing with interrogative sentences. OS's approach, which insightfully combines a modern methodology, pragmatics, and traditional linguistic-philological scrutiny, makes the volume original. The author tackles a word order problem by compiling a corpus of sentences analyzed in a statistical table; structures and figures recorded in the table are interpreted from a pragmatic perspective and these interpretations are explained and illustrated by a set of examples judiciously selected and well annotated. The pages devoted to the placement of juxtaposed attributive adjectives (pp. 229-237) are a perfect example of this procedure.
Dr. Spevak has written a readable and well-structured book on a challenging subject. It would be interesting to complement the pragmatic approach by the inclusion of diachronic and typological considerations. The author of Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose is well equipped to undertake this broader research agenda.
REFERENCES Adams, James Noel. 1976. A typological approach to Latin word order. Indogermanische Forschungen 81: 70-100.
Bauer, Brigitte, L.M. 2009. Word Order. In: Baldi, Philip, and Pierluigi Cuzzolin. New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009, 241-316.
Devine, A. M., and Laurence D. Stephens. 2006. Latin word order: structured meaning and information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Rec. by E. Torrego in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.09.33 <http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2006/2006-09-33.html>, O. Spevak in Mnemosyne 60 (2007) 497-501 and A. Mahoney in Versification 5 (2010) 39-45 http://www.arsversificandi.net/current/review_devine.pdf.)
Dik, Simon C., and Kees Hengeveld. 1997. The theory of functional grammar. 2 vols. 2nd revised edition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Firbas, Jan. 1992. Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication. Studies in English language. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. (The book is a synthesis of the author's previous work.)
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1962. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In : Universals of Language, Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.) 73-113. Cambridge MA: MIT; on line (19631): http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Artikel02/
Panhuis, Dirk G. J. 1982. The communicative perspective in the sentence: a study of Latin word order. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
Spevak, Olga. 2010. Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publ. Co. (Link LC : http://lccn.loc.gov/2009048325; Link Google Books : http://books.google.lu/books?id=bb44vnDdoIkC&lpg=PP1&ots=07anUg8TXN&dq=Constituent%20order%20in%20Classical%20Latin%20prose&hl=fr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false; Rev. by J. G. F. Powell in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2011.06.30 < http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2011/2011-06-30.html> and R. Hoffmann in Gymnasium 118 / 2 / 2011, 192-194)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Joseph Reisdoerfer studied Classics and French in Heidelberg, Angers Reims, Nancy, and Paris and holds doctorates in French literature (Nancy 2), linguistics (Nancy 2) and Latin (Paris X Nanterre). He teaches Latin and French at the Athénée grand-ducal in Luxembourg and at the Université du Luxembourg.
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