Journal of Latin Linguistics
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | De Gruyter Mouton (DE) |
| ISSN | 2194-8739 / 2194-8747 |
| Scopus | 21101136682 |
| Wikidata | Q96717496 |
| OpenAlex | S2764755160 |
| Website | http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/joll |
| Total publications | 71 |
| Coverage period | 1986 - 2025 |
| Country | DE |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 5 |
| Impact factor | 0.098 |
| SJR | 0.123 (Q3) |
| SNIP | 0.93 |
| CiteScore | 0.8 |
| h-index | 2 |
| Female authorship share | 33.3% |
This journal is dedicated to Latin linguistics, a specific branch of linguistics. Linguistic anthropology is a core subfield of anthropology, making this journal highly relevant to the broader discipline
Linguistics and Language · Big Data and Digital Economy · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Ferroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies
More on the collapse of contrastive vowel length in late Latin
This article reexamines a thorny and much-debated issue of Latin and Romance studies, i.e. the loss of contrastive vowel length, which Latin had but which did not survive into any Romance language. Among the crucial evidence for assessing the chronology and exact course of the demise of Latin vowel length are the metalinguistic testimonies of grammarians. These have recently received accurate treatment and have been invoked by some (most notably,…
Source preverbs and motion verbs in Latin. A quantitative approach to ab- and ex
This paper provides a corpus-based quantitative diachronic analysis of the evolution of the preverbs ab- and ex- in Latin, focusing on their expression of the Source in motion verbs. Drawing on a corpus spanning between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE, the study examines the frequency and syntactic patterns of these preverbs, revealing interesting shifts over centuries. Initially more frequent than ex- in Early Latin, ab- undergoes a s…
Durocortorum Vulgare
The non-standard Latin inscriptions of Durocortorum (modern Rheims) offer a unique profile among the inscriptions of the Northwest. They exhibit a reduced range of factors of Romanisation and of linguistic features, some of which, though, are unmatched within this regional corpus. The city’s role as capital of the province Belgica and as the place of Clovis’ christening contrasts with the lowest numbers of official and Christian inscriptions, whi…
Collocations as motivators of new verb meanings
In this paper we deal with verb-noun collocations as a mechanism for the creation of new meanings in verbs. We understand that the unitary character of these constructions together with their high productivity allows that, sometimes, the base noun is elided and the verb assumes the global meaning of the construction, as it happens with the English verb to play in its meaning ‘to make an instrument sound’, arising from collocations such as to play…
A note on Latin nota ‘mark, sign’
In this short etymological note, we derive Lat. nota ‘mark, sign’ from the PIE root *gnet- ‘press, knead’ (OE cnedan , OCS gnetǫ , etc.). It is argued that nota * gnoteh 2 initially denoted impressed or branded marks, in contradistinction to signum *seknom (from the root of secō ‘cut’), which denoted carved or incised signs
Rethinking subjecthood
This article investigates the notion of grammatical subject in impersonal predicates with non-canonical subjects in Early Latin. Impersonal constructions challenge traditional subject definitions, which typically emphasize verb agreement control, nominative case marking, and a preference for the Agent role. The aim of this research is to evaluate the subjecthood of accusative and dative arguments in impersonal predicates through syntactic, semant…
On the etymology of Latin signum and its Sabellic counterparts
The etymology of Latin signum ‘mark, sign’ and its Sabellic cognates such as Oscan segnúm ‘statue’ has long been disputed. I reevaluate the two main hypotheses as to what verbal root of Proto-Indo-European underlies these forms: * sekH - ‘cut’ (Lat. secō ) or * sek w - ‘follow’ (Lat. sequor ). The former, though well received among scholars, will turn out to be problematic from a phonological standpoint; while the syncope of the vocalized larynge…
A new hypothesis on the etymology of Lat. mulier ∼eris ‘woman’
Etymological dictionaries of Latin – whether by Ernout and Meillet, Walde and Hofmann, or de Vaan – show that the origin of mulier remains uncertain. In response, the authors propose a new etymology, pursuing a previously unexplored approach. A formal analysis, grounded in historical phonetics and comparative Indo-European linguistics, is complemented by a cultural interpretation of the hypothesized meaning. This latter perspective likewise revea…
Clausal versus phrasal comparatives in Latin
Latin, like several other Indo-European languages, resorts to (at least) two distinct syntactic patterns to form comparative complementation: clausal comparatives, where the degree taken as the standard of comparison is expressed by a full or reduced clause introduced by a particle, generally quam ; phrasal comparatives, where the standard of comparison is represented by a single phrase, typically an NP or a DP, marked for the ablative case. The …
Nisi paria non pugnant
Lexical reciprocal verbs, defined as those verbs that inherently lexicalize a symmetric situation, e.g., consentio ‘agree’, occur in at least three distinct argument structure constructions, depending on whether their participants are expressed as a single (plural) subject, asymmetrically expressed – one as subject and the other one as oblique – or only one is overtly realized. Drawing from extensive data from a corpus of Latin texts (extracted f…
Discontinuity of the noun phrase in Roman statutes from the Republican period
This article discusses discontinuity of the noun phrase, i.e. the separation of adjectival, genitival, or other modifiers from their head noun in Latin legal texts from the Republican period. Despite the common view that discontinuity, often termed ‘hyperbaton’, is a stylistic device, the study shows that discontinuity is also found in legal texts. Discontinuity mainly occurs with relative and indefinite pronouns as well as with genitival modifie…
( H ) ariuga /( h ) aruiga
The term ( h ) ariuga/ ( h ) aruiga is exclusively attested as a gloss for a sacrificial animal in Latin grammarians. However, inconsistencies in the textual transmission of the term – with fluctuations in the presence or absence of the initial h- and a different sequence of the (semi-)vocalic elements of the central syllable – necessitate a critical examination of the manuscript tradition of primary sources like Varro and Festus. A subsequent mo…
Ecce in Archaic Latin
Longstanding debate persists regarding the classification of Latin ecce as word class. While some scholars regard it as a particle or demonstrative, others characterize it as an interjection. This study examines the implications of these approaches and analyzes the behavior of ecce in Archaic Latin according to different grammatical and semantic criteria. The analysis confirms that ecce functions primarily as a predicative demonstrative. Furtherm…
Qui pro quo in Plautus’ grammar
Qui pro quo is an excellent means of creating a comic effect in ancient drama, particularly in the comedies of Plautus. In this study, qui pro quo is metaphorically transferred from drama to grammar and applied to the phenomenon of substituting one grammatical category for another. First, I will introduce the notion of canonical and non-canonical grammatical meaning, which is crucial for the idea of grammatical qui pro quo. The concept of opposit…
Seconda risposta alla Spangenberg
Risposta alla recensione di Elena Spangenberg Yanes alla mia edizione 2020 della Rhetorica ad Herennium
Article Risposta alla recensione di Elena Spangenberg Yanes alla mia edizione 2020 della Rhetorica ad Herennium was published on May 1, 2024 in the journal Journal of Latin Linguistics (volume 23, issue 1-2)
The synchrony and diachrony of example markers in Latin
This article aims to fill a gap in the current literature on the pragmatics of Latin by proposing a corpus-based analysis of the different words (e.g., ut , uelut , sicut ), phrases (e.g., exempli gratia , uerbi causa ), and constructions (e.g., ut puta , si dicas ) exploited to signal the process of exemplification. The structures and devices that perform this discursive operation are essentially neglected in Latin handbooks of syntax and stylis…
Dormivit et resurgit. A language-ecology approach to the diachrony of the Latin ingressive perfect
After the merger of the perfect and aorist stems, the resulting perfectum stem in Latin kept its less central functions such as resultativity and ingressivity as marked aspectual meanings in its semantic potential. Occurring first in literary and especially poetic text, as a dormant, archaic function, its use was revived in the 4th century due to intensifying exchanges with New Testament Greek, where the ingressive aorist was still more productiv…
A distributional analysis of vowel quantity in a corpus of Latin texts
The paper examines the relationship between vowel quantity, syllable structure and lexical stress in Latin through a quantitative analysis carried out on a corpus of literary texts taken from Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares and Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis . Each word of the corpus was split into syllables and phonemes. Then, the corpus was annotated with phonological and prosodic information pertaining to vowel length, syllable structure, stre…
Future expressions in a sixth-century Latin translation of Josephus
Over the history of Latin, a number of ways to express futurity evolve and disappear. Perhaps most notably, the future tense is lost in all Romance languages, replaced generally by periphrases with habeo . I present here the expressions of futurity present in the Latin translation of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and Against Apion , conducted in sixth-century CE Italy under the aegis of Cassiodorus. I first examine the use of the synthetic future …
Eichner’s law in Latin, Greek and beyond
According to a phonetic rule commonly referred to as Eichner’s law , the quality of a long * ē was not affected by an adjacent laryngeal * h 2 or * h 3 in the prehistory of the individual Indo-European languages: Latin spērāre ‘hope’ spēh 2 -s- (desiderative), Old Slavic spěti ‘be successful’ spēh 2 - (cf. * sph 2 -ró- in Ved. sphirá- and Lat. prosperus ; * speh 2 -i-s- in Old Slavic spěxŭ ); Tocharian B yerpe *h 3 ērb h -o- ‘disk, orb’ (without …
Iterative or stative? New morphosemantic analyses of Latin lūgeō ‘mourn’ and doleō ‘feel pain’
This paper will start by focusing on the morphosemantics of a Latin verb lūgeō ‘mourn’, which represents an emotion felt by people mentally excruciated by their loved one’s death. Traditionally, it has been believed that the Proto-Indo-European verbal root * leu̯g - ‘break’ underlies lūgeō , but recently this etymology has been challenged. However, I will support the traditional ‘break’ hypothesis through a novel semantic comparison to doleō ‘fee…
From deceit to pain
In Late Latin, dolus ‘deceit’ expanded its semantic scope and took on the meanings of dolor ‘pain, suffering, grief, anguish’. This article lays out the literary and epigraphic attestations for dolus ‘suffering’ in full and discusses the difficulties in determining whether a change in semantics has occurred. Using digital resources such as Perseus Digital Library and the linguistic corpus LatinISE as the basis for quantitative analysis, suggested…
Multiplication, addition, and subtraction in numerals
While formal variation in Latin’s numerals is generally acknowledged, little is known about (relative) incidence, distribution, context, or linguistic productivity. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines “decads + ” in Latin, which convey the numbers between the full decads: the teens (‘eleven’ through ‘nineteen’) as well as the numerals between the higher decads starting at ‘twenty-one’ through ‘ninety-nine’. Latin’s decads + are compound…
Roman tablets as linguistic corpora
The Tabula Alimentaria Veleiana and the Tabula Ligures Baebiani are two 2nd century tablets which outline the regional implementation and execution of Trajan’s alimentary scheme. These tablets not only provide some of the longest Latin inscriptions from antiquity, but they also offer unique insight into regional linguistic patterns, as one tablet is from northern Italy and the other is from southern Italy. Given that each tablet demonstrates its …
Pre-Nominal Adjective Position in Livy
A Categorial Approach to Latin Syntax
This work investigates the effects of the application of a categorial grammar to Latin syntax. Due to the wide variety of constructions admitted in Latin, the analysis will focus on those properties of lexical items which more directly and intuitively offer the opportunity of evaluating the salient aspects and the effectiveness of the categorial strategy. Subcategorization properties of lexical items and certain word order patterns are considered…
How Latin Word Order Works
Middle Voice in Latin and the phenomenon of Split Intransitivity
The aim of this paper is to draw a sketch of the verbal voice system in Latin and possibly to shed more light on some controversial points (in particular, the status of deponent verbs (DVs)), by means of a comparison between middle voice (MV) and Split Intransitivity.
Verba peregrina
Varrò in
A few remarks on the habeo + object + passive perfect participle construction in archaic Latin, with special reference to lexical semantics and the reanalysis process
In this paper I focus on the contexts that might have favoured the reanalysis process which leads the sequence
The sigmatic subjunctive in Plautus and Terence
Compared to the 'regular' subjunctives, the sigmatic ones (types
One suffix, two stories. The Latin development of IE verbal adjectives in *-to
Ordres VSO et SVO dans la Vulgate
A short note on the notion of register in Latin
In the present paper the notion of register is discussed in some detail. The claim that the register is determined by the intersection of what is actually taking place, who is taking part, and what part the language is playing shows some shortcomings. A new, slightly different definition of register is proposed, where also the notion of communicative intention plays a crucial role. The new definition of register will be illustrated in the present…
Some considerations on the apodotic uses of atque and et (2nd c. BC–2nd c. AD)
This paper deals with the phenomenon often referred to as “parahypotaxis,” that is, with the cases in which an adverbial phrase is linked to the matrix clause by means of a copulative conjunction that “breaks” the hypotactic nexus, e.g., Gel. 2,29,8
How to say ‘please’ in post-Classical Latin
Directives in Latin comedy
This paper analyzes directive expressions in Plautus’s
Lucilius and Nigidius Figulus on orthographic iconicity
The comic poet Lucilius proposed several orthographic prescriptions in the ninth book of his Satirae , written in the period 115–110 BC. In dealing with this topic, Lucilius severely criticized Accius’ statements on orthography, refusing his proposals of doubling vowels (“ geminatio vocalium ”) and overgeneralization of for /i:/. Lucilius’ prescriptions, which were borrowed by the philosopher Nigidius Figulus a century later, clearly follow the i…
Nominalization as a typological phenomenon
This study deals both with action nouns as a semantic class of word formation and with nominalization as a derivational process via offering a lot of relevant data in a kind of typological confrontation. Oswald Panagl investigates Latin examples applying criteria such as productivity, regularity, semantic transparency and syntactic behavior. As a result, he denotes derivations in - tiōn as the most vivid and active type of action noun delivering …
Latin Curse Tablets of the Roman Empire [Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 17]
On Varro’s and Cicero’s spelling and pronunciation
After taking into account the points stressed by Dr. Biddau, I will show that he misinterpreted Varro, Ling . 9.80 and Cic. De orat . 45–46, two basic references of his discussion, and that he did not consider Cicero’s whole passage. On the other hand, he did not focus on the epigraphic situation at all, as it has been described recently by Adams (2007. The regional diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.).…
Composite predicates in the layers of Latin
The present study gives a comprehensive portrait of the accusatival-passival type of the composite-predicate (or support-verb) construction in the history of Latin. Taking stock of properties shows them to only minimally serve as a touchstone distinguishing between Latin composite predicates and syntagmatically identical verb + direct object constructs. The intricate issue of idiomaticity and the prospects of establishing its parameters are discu…
The category of number in Latin
This paper deals with the category of number in Latin, specifically with the different meanings of the plural with verbal nouns. In the first section, I establish a reference framework on the concept of number, and in particular the so-called “number anomalies”. The second part of the paper addresses the functional complexity of the category of number itself, so it presents and exemplifies the four different meanings of plural forms with verbal n…
Greeting in Roman comedy
This article investigates multiple pragmatic facets of Latin greeting as depicted in the corpus of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence). To this end, different frameworks are combined, including Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and the most prominent (Im)politeness Theories. The complexity of the greeting phenomenon is first demonstrated by identifying its position inside the opening section of the dialogue with possible reductions, elaborati…
Patterns of interpredictability and principal parts in Latin verb paradigms
This paper provides a fully word-based, abstractive analysis of predictability in Latin verb paradigms. After reviewing previous traditional and theoretically grounded accounts of Latin verb inflection, a procedure is outlined where the uncertainty in guessing the content of paradigm cells given knowledge of one or more inflected wordforms is measured by means of the information-theoretic notions of unary and n- ary implicative entropy, respectiv…
Pompeii Commentum in Artis Donati Partem Tertiam, Tomo I
Korkiakangas, Timo
Book Review
The syntax of the Latin presentative adverb ecce
This paper provides an analysis of the variables that determine the syntactic distribution of ecce , a presentative adverb in Latin. Traditionally, grammarians have simply regarded ecce as an adverb (similar to here ) or an interjection (similar to hey! ) but this lexicographic view misses important syntactic phenomena. For example, adverbs in Latin can follow subjects, but ecce cannot. Interjections can be used as single words to express surpris…
Piissimus and pientissimus
The combined analysis of epigraphic, literary and grammatical sources allows light to be shed on linguistic problems concerning the two superlatives of pius , piissimus and pientissimus , which have been mostly overlooked by scholars to date. Regarding the first superlative, Cicero says that it does not exist in Latin (CIC. Phil . 13.43.9), whereas the second form is exclusively attested in epigraphy, with no occurrences in ancient literary or sc…