30.2818, Review: Latin; Historical Linguistics; Syntax: Danckaert (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2818. Thu Jul 18 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2818, Review: Latin; Historical Linguistics; Syntax: Danckaert (2017)

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Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:03:25
From: Bruno Maroneze [maronezebruno at yahoo.com.br]
Subject: The Development of Latin Clause Structure

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36498277


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-3603.html

AUTHOR: Lieven  Danckaert
TITLE: The Development of Latin Clause Structure
SUBTITLE: A Study of the Extended Verb Phrase
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Bruno O. Maroneze, Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados

SUMMARY

“The development of Latin clause structure”, by Lieven Danckaert, is a study
on Classical Latin word order and other related phenomena. It is the 24th
volume of the “Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics” series
and, as described in the “Acknowledgements”, synthesizes five-years of
research the author carried out between 2011 and 2016. Its 356 pages are
divided in six chapters enriched with a glossary of important terms and three
indexes (index locorum – where to find Latin quotations, author index and
subject index).

The first (and longest) chapter (entitled “What is at stake”) presents the
phenomena that will be analyzed as well as most theoretical concepts necessary
to understand the analyses. As the author states, the book has two main goals:
the first one is to describe and analyze two “word order alterations in the
Latin clause, namely the variable distribution of the orders ‘object-verb’
(OV) and ‘verb-object’ (VO) […] and the alternation between the orders
‘non-finite verb-auxiliary’ (VAux) and ‘auxiliary-non-finite verb’ (AuxV)”
(page 1). The second goal addresses “the question of which type of theoretical
approach is best suited to describing and analysing facts of Latin word order”
(page 3). The author then demonstrates the highly flexible Latin word order
with many examples extracted from a corpus (pages 3-9) and presents an
overview of the theoretical approaches that try to explain this flexibility
(pages 9-22). Four groups of approaches are described: non-configurational,
semi-configurational, hybrid and fully configurational. The author’s position
is that the fully configurational approach is superior to the others, a
statement that will be argued for in the remainder part of this chapter.

As part of this argument, the author intends to answer the question “does
Latin have a VP constituent?” (page 30). Some pieces of evidence are brought
up: the first one is the “Negation-Verb Ordering Restriction” (NegVOR for
short), a generalization that Danckaert is probably the first to describe.
This generalization goes as follows:

“In Latin, the marker of sentential negation ‘non’ always linearly precedes
the hierarchically highest clause-mate verb, but it can either precede or
follow all other verbs in the same clause.” (page 41).

Danckaert also proposes an explanation of this constraint in terms of phrase
structure (pages 45-68) and, after that, discusses other pieces of evidence
for a VP constituent in Latin, like the possibility of coordinating “strings
consisting of a direct object and a dependent non-finite lexical verb” (page
68) and the existence of VP ellipsis and VP pronominalization in Latin, among
others (pages 69-73). He concludes the chapter claiming that a
configurational, phrase-structure approach to Latin syntax is superior to
alternative approaches, and that structural ambiguity is an important issue to
be taken into account.

The second chapter (“Latin corpus linguistics and the study of language
change”) is dedicated to methodological issues. At first, the author argues
for a statistical treatment of diachronic data (pages 79-83) and presents his
corpus (pages 83-101), containing about 3,700,000 words and 39 texts, running
from roughly 200 BC until 590 AD. In order to assure that the corpus is a
reliable source for the study of Latin language change, Danckaert presents a
case study unrelated to his main issue, namely the development of the future
perfect passive: as it is known by Latinists, future perfect passive tense (‘I
will have been loved’, for example) is formed by the be-auxiliary and the past
participle; however, the tense of the be-auxiliary may be either the future
‘imperfect’ (like ‘amatus ero’) or the future perfect (like ‘amatus fuero’).
In the first case, there is a mismatch between the tense of the be-auxiliary
and the tense of the whole periphrasis; in the second case, there is no such
tense mismatch. The first pattern is diachronically older than the second one
and the data of the assembled corpus correctly map this change, showing that
the corpus is indeed reliable as a source for diachronic studies.

Chapter Three (“Multiple object positions and how to diagnose them”) is
dedicated mainly to showing that Latin clauses have multiple possible
positions for the placement of the object. At first, the author presents
statistical data on the alternation VO/OV in his corpus, showing that
different syntactic environments yield different (and sometimes contradictory)
results. He then presents the hypothesis that there are more than two possible
positions for the object, that can be disambiguated in clauses with two verbs
(one finite and another non-finite). When the order VOAux is counted as OV and
the order AuxOV is counted as VO, for example, the results appear to show a
diachronic change from OV to VO, which is as expected from the data of the
Romance languages. As the author says, “[w]e can conclude that the OV/VO
alternation is not simply a matter of objects either appearing preverbally or
postverbally. Instead, […] a more fine-grained classification is required to
arrive at an accurate description of the empirical data” (page 136). The
remainder of the chapter is dedicated to the syntactic formalization (in X-bar
terms) of the multiple object positions and of the clauses with modals and
auxiliaries, as well as the formal and semantic differences between clauses
with be-auxiliaries and with the various kinds of modals.

The fourth chapter (“VOAux – a typologically rare word order pattern”)
continues to refine the description of object placement in Latin. Many
graphics are presented which show frequencies of specific order patterns
(object shift, object extraposition, different positions of modal verbs etc.),
in order to test all possible contexts and verify which of them show more
diachronic change. The author shows that a large discrepancy is found between
VPAux and AuxVP clauses: in VPAux clauses, the order VO decreases very
abruptly from ca. 100 AD; in AuxVP clauses, approximately the opposite is
true: the order VO increases from about the same period (although not so
abruptly). In order to explain that, Danckaert presents an account of the
VOAux pattern in X-bar-theory terms, and, based on Latin examples, proposes a
synchronic description of this pattern’s derivation. He concludes the chapter
by discussing some aspects of the loss of VOAux in Late Latin, a subject that
will be treated in the next chapters.

In Chapter 5 (“Changing EPP parameters – Clause structure in Classical and
Late Latin”), Danckaert presents his main explanation of the change from
Classical to Late Latin. He describes two grammar systems, called ‘Grammar A’
and ‘Grammar B’, which enter into competition at some point in the history of
Latin. According to his hypothesis, there is the requirement so satisfy the
“clausal EPP-requirement” (p. 216), a notion that is explained in pages
229-233. As such, in Grammar A, “VP movement takes place to satisfy this
EPP-requirement” (p. 225), whereas, in Grammar B, “movement of the highest
verbal head applies to perform the same function” (p. 225). Besides, the
author also proposes that the main ‘cause’ of the shift from Grammar A to
Grammar B was “incorporation of the negator ‘non’ into the hierarchically
highest verb in the clause” (p. 268). 

The sixth and last chapter (“The development of BE-periphrases”) aims at
describing some of the differences between modal and be-periphrases. The
author presents initially the two possible patterns of passive (and deponent)
be-periphrases in Latin, which he refers to as ‘E-periphrases’ and
‘F-periphrases’ (respectively, in the infinitive, ‘amatus esse’ and ‘amatus
fuisse’, both meaning ‘to be loved’). The F-pattern, despite being already
attested in Plautus, increases its frequency over time and is felt as a ‘new
pattern’. As the author shows, both patterns have different preferences in
terms of word order: the E-pattern favors the order Past Participle + ‘sum’,
while the F-pattern (although less frequent) favors the order ‘sum’ + Past
Participle. As such, Danckaert hypothesizes that both periphrases have
distinct diachronic developments. On pages 272 to 289, he then presents rich
analyses of how both patterns have emerged diachronically and concludes that
the shift from E- to F-periphrasis (which survives in Romance languages) is
correlated to the general loss of the synthetic passive form.

A three-page epilogue closes the text, in which the author summarizes the main
points of his whole argumentation and also presents an explanation of the
reason that the order OV was eventually lost. The reader is referred to a
submitted paper on this subject, but the main argument is that “in Grammar B
it is more difficult for the VP-internal OV-order to be cued unambiguously
than in Grammar A, a state of affairs that ultimately leads to the order VO
taking over completely” (page 294). At the end of the book, there is a
glossary of technical terms (pages 296-306) followed by the references and
indices (pages 307-356).

EVALUATION

“The development of Latin clause structure” is a generative-theoretic analysis
of some aspects of Latin syntax, from a diachronic point of view. Danckaert
develops his argumentation based on a very rich and consistent corpus of Latin
texts, as well as a deep understanding of the theories required to explain the
data. The author successfully manages to correlate data which do not seem to
be related at first, such as the position of the negation and the order of
object placement, and builds solid theories to accommodate these and other
data. It should also be pointed out that the work is rich in statistical data,
which prove to be very important in the author’s conclusions.

Using a generative-based approach to analyze a language without native
speakers is certainly a huge challenge, especially because, methodologically,
these approaches are usually based on native speakers’ intuitions. Danckaert
does not address this issue in his book, instead assuming that the sentences
attested in the corpus are grammatical. At first, I was expecting to find at
least some justification for the use of corpus data in a generative-based
analysis; instead, the chapter dedicated to methodology discusses the very
important question on how to use statistics to describe variation and change.
As I am not a ‘generative linguist’ (and, as such, I am now fully aware of
more recent developments of this approach), I assume that this issue is
already settled in the literature.

It is worth pointing that the book is mainly a theoretical, generative-based
approach to Latin. Classicists and Latinists without an interest in or a good
understanding of generative linguistic theory may not find the book so
helpful. Although the reader will find in the text explanations for all the
relevant concepts of generative theory (and the glossary at the end of the
book is also helpful), one usually needs some familiarity with the theory and
with the tree-like representations of sentence structure. An important
exception, in my opinion, is Chapter Six, which develops a deep analysis of
the two passive periphrases with very few theory-specific concepts.

Some minor problems could be pointed out, although they do not disqualify the
work as a whole. Firstly, on pages 54 and 55, the concept of ‘fragment
question’ (or ‘fragment why-question’) is referred to, without examples or
discussion of what it specifically means. This concept could be explained in a
footnote, for example, in order for the reader to better understand  this
passage.

Secondly, there are three minor typos and mistakes:

a)  On page 47, where one reads “… which represents a fairly simply case of
RM”, it should be “fairly simple”.

b)  When discussing OV-order structure, on pages 183-184, one reads “The basic
structure of a VO-clause would be as in (4)”. But since (4) shows an
OV-structure, one should read, probably, “The basic structure of an
OV-clause…”.

c)  When discussing the stages in Jespersen’s Cycle (page 249), one reads
“Early and Classical Latin would represent stage 1a”; but there is no stage 1a
in the detailed structure of the cycle on page 249. The author probably meant
stage 1’.

These minor issues pointed here do not diminish at all the importance of the
book. Danckaert’s work is a very deep research with important analyses and is
definitely a must-read for linguists interested in diachronic studies of
Latin, especially those working on generative approaches.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Bruno Maroneze completed his Ph.D. in the University of Sao Paulo in 2011. His
Ph.D. thesis focuses on Brazilian Portuguese neologisms formed by suffixation.
His main research interests are on Lexicology, specifically word formation,
neologisms and diachronic studies of the lexicon. He is currently teaching in
the School of Communication, Arts and Letters of the Universidade Federal da
Grande Dourados, MS,Brazil





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