27.2348, Review: Historical Ling; Morphology; Syntax: Bordal Hertzenberg (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2348. Wed May 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2348, Review: Historical Ling; Morphology; Syntax: Bordal Hertzenberg (2015)

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Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 14:54:37
From: Eleonora Sausa [eleonorasausa at gmail.com]
Subject: Third Person Reference in Late Latin

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3960.html

AUTHOR: Mari Johanne Bordal Hertzenberg
TITLE: Third Person Reference in Late Latin
SUBTITLE: Demonstratives, Definite Articles and Personal Pronouns in the Itinerarium Egeriae
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 288
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Eleonora Sausa, Università degli Studi di Pavia

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY

The volume “Third person reference in Late Latin” by Mari Johanne Bordal
Hertzenberg is an interesting monograph on the status of demonstratives,
definite articles, and personal pronouns in the fourth century Latin text
commonly known as “Itinerarium Egeriae”. The volume is organized in seven
chapters.

In the “Introduction”, the author first presents the object of her study: a
synchronic study of the third person referring expressions in the late fourth
century text “Itinerarium Egeriae”. Next, she briefly reviews previous
research on demonstratives in Late Latin and their development, discussing the
nature of demonstratives, definite articles and personal pronouns and their
interrelationship in Late Latin. She also considers various hypotheses
concerning how the definite articles and personal pronouns developed and the
causal factors to explain why these changes took place. The introduction
closes with a clear statement of the research questions that emerged from
previous literature reviews on this topic. The first is a precise
understanding of the categories of demonstrative, definite article, personal
pronoun, and intensifier, which tend to be lacking in the literature. The
second is the study of the interrelationship among the third person referring
expressions. The third is exploring the emergence of the third person personal
pronouns.

Chapter 2, “Theoretical Foundations”, is devoted to the theoretical issues
underlying the study. In section 2.1, Hertzenberg first discusses the major
views on definiteness in literature with the aim of establishing a concept of
definiteness. She also reviews the well-known uniqueness, familiarity,
inclusiveness, and identifiability hypotheses of definiteness, discussing the
virtues and limits of these theories. She finally argues in favor of
definiteness as the identifiability of discourse referents and assumes that
the choice of referring expression is determined by the accessibility of the
referent. Accessibility and the choice of referring expression is largely
discussed in section 2.2. The author refers to accessibility in the sense of
Ariel (1988) as a psychological and memory-based notion, referring to the
mental status of referents in the addressee’s memory. She then considers the
variables that may influence accessibility and the choice of referring
expressions, taking into account the givenness status of a referent, the
distance of the referent to the antecedent, the animacy of the referent. The
topicality of the antecedent and its syntactic function are accounted for as
other relevant variables which influence the accessibility of a referent,
together with the type of clause in which the antecedent occurs. Hertzenberg
also discusses the interaction of accessibility with Grice’s maxim of
quantity.

In section 2.3, Hertzenberg explores the properties and uses of three major
exponents of definiteness, that is, personal pronouns, definite articles, and
demonstratives. The author also assumes that together with such definiteness
exponents there are null pronouns, that is, a special type of pronouns that
require higher accessibility than overt pronominal forms. She briefly
discusses the question as to when a demonstrative has become a definite
article or a personal pronoun. Finally, the author outlines the properties of
intensifiers.   

Chapter 3, “Methods and data extraction”, contains a brief description of the
annotated corpus used for the research and of the methodology adopted in the
extraction of data. The “Itinerarium Egeriae” is included in the annotated
PROIEL (Pragmatic resources in Old Indo-European Languages) corpus created at
the University of Oslo. The author describes the multilayered annotation of
the PROIEL corpus, focusing in particular on the annotation of the information
structure which includes givenness, anaphoricity, topicality, and on semantic
annotation which includes animacy. Finally, a description of the data
extraction and the information contained in the data, together with a brief
note on the statistical methods used in her work, are also provided.

In Chapter 4, “Full NPs, overt pronominal forms and null pronouns”,
Hertzenberg focuses on the three main groups of referring expressions in the
“Itinerarium Egeriae”, that is, full noun phrases, overt pronominal forms, and
null pronouns. The author provides interesting quantitative data followed by a
detailed analysis and a deep discussion concerning the interaction between the
variables influencing accessibility and the choice of referring expression,
considering above all the anaphoric and non-anaphoric uses of these forms.

Chapter 5, “High accessibility markers: pronominal forms”, contains a
discussion on the pronominal forms in the “Itinerarium Egeriae”. The author
analyzes the anaphoric and non-anaphoric uses of the pronominal demonstratives
«hic», «idem», «ille», «ipse», is and of the null (subject) pronoun «pro». She
discusses to what extent «ille» and «ipse» can be considered personal pronouns
in the “Itinerarium Egeriae” and finally establishes an accessibility
hierarchy of the pronominal expressions which is organized as follows: ‘pro/is
> ipse > ille > hic’.

In Chapter 6, “Low accessibility markers: full NPs”, Hertzenberg discusses
several types of noun phrases, namely, «hic» NPs, «idem» NPs, «ille» NPs,
«ipse» NPs, «iste» NPs and bare NPs. The author addresses the question as to
whether adnominal «ipse» is an intensifier before discussing non-anaphoric
(section 6.2) and anaphoric reference (section 6.4). Finally, Hertzenberg
arranges in an accessibility hierarchy the types of full NPs taken into
account, which is organized as follows: ‘ille/hic NPs > ipse NPs > is/idem NPs
> bare NPs’.

Chapter 7, “Conclusions”, contains the summary of the main results of the work
carried out by Hertzenberg. The author discusses the results concerning the
interrelationship between the third person referring expressions and proposes
a unique accessibility hierarchy of the referring expressions (p. 339) both
for pronominal forms and for full NPs in the “Itinerarium Egeriae”. The final
remarks underline that «ille» and «ipse» are personal pronouns in the
“Itinerarium Egeriae” but not definite articles, with some rare exceptions.
Hertzenberg’s hypothesis is that the contexts in which the demonstratives are
not necessary for the identification of the referent but rather mark emotion
or expressivity are the contexts of origin of the definite articles;
nonetheless, she admits that further research is necessary to establish the
validity of this hypothesis. Furthermore, other data from Augustine’s Sermons
are provided confirming the trends observed in the “Itinerarium Egeriae” which
allows the author to assume that the findings of this study do reflect general
usage in spoken language around 400 AD. Finally, Hertzenberg lists some
theoretical implications for accessibility and referring expressions and
suggests directions for future research in this field.

EVALUATION

The book “Third person reference in Late Latin” convincingly pursues the goal
of providing a complete and coherent analysis of the status of demonstratives,
definite articles, and personal pronouns in the “Itinerarium Egeriae”. Indeed,
this volume provides not only precious results and conclusions on the status
of third person reference expressions in the “Itinerarium Egeriae”, but it
also gives to the reader an excellent and original overview on some discussed
categories frequently used in pragmatic and discourse-based approaches to
language. 

>From the point of view of the organization of the work, the book is well
structured and easy to follow. The two parts of the book, the theoretical
foundations and the state of the art with the review of the existing
literature on one hand, and the presentation and analysis of the data taken in
exam on the other hand, are perfectly balanced and complementary. The first
part adequately describes the research questions, while the second part
systematically develops the research, answering to each question. Useful
summaries are often provided by the author during the step-by-step development
of the argumentation, which help the reader to follow the line of reasoning
and the rigorous analyses. 

Together with the results obtained concerning the main topic of the book -
third person reference expressions in Late Latin - Hertzenberg presents the
most updated reflections on categories often vague and hard to define, such as
definiteness, accessibility, identifiability and topicality, reviewing the
existing literature and providing proper definitions. For these reasons,
certainly this monograph can be of interest to Latin and Romance linguists,
but also for theoretical and general linguists, and for those interested in
pragmatics and discourse-based approaches. 

The study exploits the most recent digital resources and methodologies for the
extraction and analysis of data. The use of the PROIEL corpus and the best
employ of its multilayered annotation are exemplar and make the collection of
data accurate, complete, and rich of metalinguistic information. 

The fine analysis, perfectly carried out both from a quantitative and a
qualitative point of view, provides to the reader a clear understanding of
what the author argues, thanks to the organization of data in tables, their
treatment with statistical methods adequately explained, and their
representation through graphs. Furthermore, the many Latin examples,
well-glossed and translated, can be understood and appreciated by linguists of
any field of expertise.  

In conclusion, this monograph has a valuable importance as the most complete
and updated description of the system of third person reference expressions in
the “Itinerarium Egeriae”, and it also provides a crucial contribution to the
discussion of the development of «ille» and «ipse» into definite articles and
personal pronouns, fitting the current and challenging debate on the
development of definite articles from Latin to Romance languages.

Overall, this volume convincingly meets the author’s goals and fulfills the
reader’s expectations, representing an excellent research and an inspiring
starting point for further studies.

REFERENCES

Ariel, Mira. 1988. Referring and Accessibility. Journal of pragmatics, 31(3),
363-397.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eleonora Sausa has obtained her PhD in Linguistics in December 2015 at the
University of Pavia. Her research topics include diachronic linguistics,
Historical and Indo-European linguistics, Ancient Greek syntax, Construction
Grammar, Digital Humanities, and teaching Italian as second language.

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