In this two-volume work, the first full-scale treatment of its kind in English, Harm Pinkster applies contemporary linguistic theories and the findings of traditional grammar to the study of Latin syntax. He takes a non-technical and principally descriptive approach, based on literary and non-literary texts dating from c.250 BC to c.450 AD. The volumes contain a wealth of examples to illustrate the grammatical phenomena under discussion, many of them from the works of Plautus and Cicero, alongside extensive references to other sources of examples such as the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. While the first volume explored the simple clause, this second volume focuses on the complex sentence and discourse. The first three chapters examine different types of subordinate clause; the following four then explore relative clauses, coordination, comparison, and secondary predicates. Later chapters investigate information structure and extraclausal expressions, word order, and discourse and related features. The Oxford Latin Syntax will be a valuable and up-to-date resource both for professional Latinists and all linguists with an interest in Classics.

Publisher description

Latin is a language with variable (so-called 'free') word order. "Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose "(Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust) presents the first systematic description of its constituent order from a pragmatic point of view. Apart from general characteristics of Latin constituent order, it discusses the ordering of the verb and its arguments in declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences, as well as the ordering within noun phrases. It shows that the relationship of a constituent with its surrounding context and the communicative intention of the writer are the most reliable predictors of the order of constituents in a sentence or noun phrase. It differs from recent studies of Latin word order in its scope, its theoretical approach, and its attention to contextual information. The book is intended both for Latinists and for linguists working in the fields of the Romance languages and language typology.