Latin

Controversie. Dispute letterarie, storiche, religiose dall'Antichità al Rinascimento, a cura di Gloria Larini, presentazione di Franco Cardini, Libreriauniversitaria.it Edizioni, 2013, in "Limes", Centro de Estudios Clásicos, Santiago de Chile, 2014. di Gloria Larini Il volume miscellaneo, che si apre con la presentazione del professor Franco Cardini, si presenta come un percorso tematico sulle "controversie" letterarie, storiche e religiose, declinato attraverso una serie di studi scientifici di diverso taglio disciplinare. L'idea nasce da un seminario proposto dal professor Franco Cardini agli studenti del Dottorato di Ricerca in Antichità Medioevo Rinascimento dell'Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane di Firenze, ora fuso con la Scuola Normale Superiore. Alla base di questa ricerca c'è il desiderio di una riflessione scientifica su un concetto di controversia, che risulti svincolato da strutture ideologiche fuorvianti, da interpretazioni, talvolta tendenziose, la volontà di rivisitare giudizi su alcuni avvenimenti, specialmente dopo il tragico 11 settembre 2001, basati, talvolta, su tesi "pseudo-culturali", che sottolineano spesso il tema dello "scontro tra civiltà", con un revival delle teorie spengleriane, dell'Untergang des Abenlandes, dagli intenti spesso mistificatori (dalla Presentazione di Franco Cardini, p. 9). La parola "controversia" in questa miscellanea si deve intendere in senso lato come "confronto, contrasto, combattimento" sia verbale che reale, termine derivato dal latino "contra vertere", che letteralmente significa "volgere di fronte, contro" (dall'Introduzione di Gloria Larini, p. 11). I saggi che la compongono, in tutto sette, sono stati accorpati in settori distinti del volume, a seconda del diverso modo in cui si può intendere l'idea di controversia.

In Latin, the gerund and the present participle often function as the predicate of an adjunct clause. In Late Latin, the frequency of such clauses is hypothesized to increase with the ablative of the gerund and to decrease with the nominative of the present participle. This evolution leads to the “gradual replacement of the present participle by the gerund” (Pinkster 2015: 549), whereby the former is ousted from its verbal function and confined to a purely adjectival role. This process is triggered by the “semantic bleaching” of the gerund, whose original manner/instrumental value gradually “weakens” into the default value of the present participle, viz. a temporal one. This paper aims to investigate the functional competition between the two clause types in a corpus of technical texts between the 2nd c. BC and the 6th c. AD. We show that the semantic bleaching of the gerund is not significant in our corpus and hence does not confirm its functional competition with the present participle. We argue that the two clause types have different semantic and pragmatic properties and that these differences remain stable over time.

We present the process to enhance the lexical basis of the Latin morphological analyser LEMLAT with the entries from the Medieval Latin glossary Du Cange. This process is performed semi-automatically by exploiting morphological properties of lemmas, a previously available word list enhanced with inflectional information, and the contents of the lexical entries of Du Cange.

The paper focuses on the ways of expressing mirative semantics in the Latin language. Mirativity is a grammatical category which expresses the speaker’s unprepared mind, a deferred realization of a situation and concomitant surprise. These values can be conveyed by both lexical and grammatical means. The paper analyses only grammatical phenomena, without taking into consideration any lexical devices (such as the verb (ad)mirari), and shows that in addition to the basic meanings of time, mood etc. these grammatical phenomena, in certain contexts, express the semantics of abruptness and surprise. Since their primary meaning is not mirative and appears as a “side effect”, they should be called mirative strategies rather than miratives stricto sensu. Such strategies may be reflected through morphological categories of time and mood (e.g. Praesens coniunctivi, Futurum indicativi, Imperfectum indicativi), auxiliaries (particles, conjunctions) or syntactic constructions (Accusativus exclamationis, Infinitivus indignantis). Their mirative meaning is contextually conditioned and in some cases is only possible in interaction with other grammatical categories (verbal person, number, etc.). The study investigates pragmatic and stylistic functions of these phenomena and shows that the choice of a strategy in some cases is directly related to the genre of work and the style of speech. The genre distribution of mirative strategies we suggested allows us to consider them not only as linguistic entities to express modal meanings, but also as a stylistic device.