Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information
A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens
Abstract
Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at least using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book introduces the linguistic concepts, formalism, and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then presents and analyzes a representative selection of data in sufficient detail to foster both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that un ... More
Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at least using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book introduces the linguistic concepts, formalism, and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then presents and analyzes a representative selection of data in sufficient detail to foster both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this book aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general cross-categorical system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.
Keywords:
syntax,
formalism,
analytical techniques,
semantics,
pragmatics,
linguistics,
philology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195181685 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181685.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
A. M. Devine, author
Stanford University
Author Webpage
Laurence D. Stephens, author
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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