Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

Abstract

Classical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

“…The Latin language exhibits great freedom in word order and the general consensus in the field is that this word order variation is governed by information structure, the potential weight and complexity of the arguments, genre, etc. (Pinkster 1991;Devine & Stephens 2006;Spevak 2010;Skopeteas 2011;Ledgeway 2012;Danckaert 2015;inter alia). Pinkster (1991: 72) offers some statistics on the relative word order of nominative subjects, the verb and accusative objects, as shown in Table 5.…”