Based on a detailed analysis of syntax, information structure and pragmatic organization, Left-dislocation in Latin by Hilla Halla-Aho examines how left-dislocation is used in republican Latin comedy, prose and inscriptions as a device to introduce topics.

This book focuses on the continuity between the documented stages in the history of Latin and its development into Romance.

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.

This monograph is one of the first studies that approaches Latin syntax from a formal perspective, combining detailed corpus-based description with formal theoretical analysis. The empirical focus is word order in embedded clauses, with special attention to clauses in which one or more constituents surface to the left of a subordinating conjunction. It is proposed that two such types of left peripheral fronting should be distinguished. The proposed analyses shed light not only on the clausal left periphery, but also on the overall structure of the Latin clause. The study is couched in the framework of generative grammar, but since a thorough introduction is provided, no special background in formal syntax is required. Major topics touched upon are word order, information structure, locality, and the syntax of pied-piping. The book covers both synchronic and diachronic topics of Latin syntax, and is of interest for classical philologists, historical linguists, and formal syntacticians.

This textbook provides a detailed introduction to the study of Latin from the perspective of contemporary linguistics. It adopts some basic tenets of generative grammar in an in-depth analysis of the main phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Latin, and offers a step-by-step guide to the universal principles and specific parameters which shape the language, along with comparative data from English and other languages. Latin: A Linguistic Introduction is a user-friendly and essential guide to the synchronic study of Latin as a natural language. The clarity of exposition and the richness of the examples cited provide a new approach to Latin as a topic of linguistic research: although the general structure of the book is like that of a traditional Latin grammar, the discussion of grammatical rules is both more straightforward and more theoretically informed. This textbook is principally suitable for students of Latin and Romance linguistics at undergraduate level and above, but also for teachers and researchers interested in new ways of looking at the study of Latin. It differs from many other textbooks in the field by striking a valuable balance between the longstanding tradition of classical philology and the innovations of contemporary linguistics.

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. Pragmatics for Latin provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging languages underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order. The author considers how far these changes are interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of Romance. He describes the historical background to the emergence of the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in detail the richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family. Adam Ledgeway reviews the accounts and explanations that have been proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent theoretical developments. His wide-ranging account shows that the transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new persepctives on language change, structure, and variation.