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Perspectives diachroniques

Morphosyntactic realignment and markedness change in Late Latin: Evidence from charter texts

La réorganisation morphosyntaxique et le changement de marquage dans le latin tardif
Timo Korkiakangas
p. 287-296

Résumés

Cet article examine comment l’accusatif latin est devenu le cas non marqué, par défaut, et comment ce tournant dans le marquage s’associe à la réorganisation morphosyntaxique en latin tardif. En latin classique, le nominatif est le cas par défaut, ce qui est typique pour les langues présentant une opposition nominatif/accusatif. En latin tardif, l’alignement nominatif/accusatif a abouti à un système sémantiquement motivé et, plus tard, au système acasuel des langues romanes. Pendant ce processus, l’accusatif est devenu le cas défaut. Une telle conclusion peut être tirée d’une comparaison des emplois « extra-syntaxiques » des nominatifs et des accusatifs avec les résultats d’une étude quantitative des sujets à l’accusatif dans le latin des chartes médiévales.

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Texte intégral

I owe many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. I also thank Ansel Siegenthaler who revised my English as well as Hilla Halla-aho, Aleksi Mäkilähde, Tommi Alho, and Ville Leppänen who commented on the first draft of the paper.

1. Introduction

  • 2 E.g. Plank, 1985; Cennamo, 2009; Rovai, 2012.

1In Classical Latin, morphosyntactic alignment had been primarily of the nominative/accusative (N/A) type with the nominative as the default case and citation form. As for Late Latin, several studies during the past fifteen or so years have postulated that the case system changed partially and temporarily into active/inactive aligned (semantically-based) before the neutralisation of the case opposition in the Romance.2 This realignment likely involved a markedness change so that the accusative came to be the unmarked default case. In this light it seems natural that the majority of the Romance nouns derive from the Latin accusative form.

  • 3 Note that, contrary to the convention of English grammar, in this paper “nominal clause” denotes a (...)

2This paper begins by defining the terms “markedness” and “default case” in the Latin context (section 2). It continues by discussing the nominal clauses3 and the morphosyntactic alignment of Latin by way of example sentences and a corpus study (sections 4 to 6). It will be shown that markedness is tightly connected to the animacy and agentivity of the noun in a semantically-based alignment: personal names are typical loci of the marked case. The study shows how the markedness change and the morphosyntactic realignment are intertwined and proposes an approximate dating for the defaultisation of the accusative (section 7).

  • 4 Plank, 1985, p. 291; Cennamo, 2009, p. 327-8; Rovai, 2012, p. 104.

3Previous studies explain the Latin realignment process from the N/A to the active/inactive marking by a semanticisation of the N/A case opposition as well as by the influence of the clause type.4 However, the scarcity of appropriate evidence weakens this appealing theory. There are only a few sources of non-literary Latin that are not transmitted through a textual history. Charter texts are practically the only substantial source that survives as originals and provides abundant information on non-standard language. This paper seeks to study the developments of the spoken early Medieval Latin through the non-standard phenomena that surface in the conservative written Latin of charters. The scribes of LLCT charters apparently still shared most of the Classical Latin ideals of spelling and morphology but, despite it, let several spoken-language related phenomena creep into their texts.

4I utilise the terms Classical and Late Latin as convenient periodising labels without any deeper consideration on the registers. In this paper, Classical Latin grammar means roughly the commonly accepted grammatical system of the Late Republican and Imperial Latin before the 4th century while Late Latin is used for the Latin of and after the 4th century. All the texts discussed are from non-literary registers.

2. Default case and markedness

5Several studies of the Late Latin morphosyntactic realignment explain the extension of the accusative to nominal clauses and subject function as caused by the accusative becoming the default case (e.g. Cennamo, 2009, p. 327). The term “default” is often used to refer to a form that is somehow the most general and normal one. In the following, I will consider some definitions of being “default” and then explain how the term will be used in this paper.

6“Default” is usually defined as the value which is chosen when no syntactic setting is specially assigned. This study is interested in default forms as far as the case is concerned. Default case occurs when there are no obvious criteria for selecting a particular case form. Schütze (2001, p.1-2) restricts “default case” only to nominal clauses:

“The default-case forms of a language are those that are used to spell out nominal expressions that are not associated with any case feature assigned or otherwise determined by syntactic mechanisms.”

7It is easy to see that default form is tightly connected to another cognitively challenging concept, namely markedness. Frazier (2007) assimilates default case and unmarked case:

“Default case appears when a (Determiner Phrase) cannot get case through normal syntactic mechanisms […]. Default case is best analyzed as an example of emergence of the unmarked. When case cannot be assigned, the least marked case is used.”

8Markedness characterises a form which appears to be unusual or difficult in comparison to a more common or regular form. The dominant default or minimum-effort form represents the unmarked pole of the marked/unmarked dichotomy while the less common or irregular form is the marked one. To define the markedness status of a form, the researcher must resolve which unit of the dichotomy is “usual” or “normal” as opposed to the “unusual” or “abnormal” form (Andersen, 2001).

9Several other terms are also related to markedness. Smith (2011) introduces the term “core value” and makes a finer distinction between the already mentioned concepts:

“The notion of ‘core’ value […] is associated with one or more of at least the following: qualitative unmarkedness, quantitative unmarkedness (higher frequency) and default status. Often, these criteria will yield identical results; but not always.”

10Smith suggests that qualitative and quantitative unmarkedness and default status can all be subsumed under a single notion, namely “core value”. Smith’s qualitative and quantitative (un)markedness is more commonly known as formal and functional markedness. Formal markedness means that the marked unit is coded with more phonetic material than the unmarked unit. Functional markedness, instead, is defined as higher distributional restrictions of the marked unit with respect to the unmarked one.

  • 5 It is true that for example in Latin the 1st declension displays unmarked nominative forms (-a vs. (...)

11It is well-known that in many Indo-European languages, Latin included, both the nominative and accusative cases are morphologically marked although cross-linguistically the nominative is expected to have no marker in a N/A alignment.5 For example, the o-declension masculines have us in the nominative and um in the accusative. It is, however, functional markedness that is of the most interest in this paper. In spite of the theoretical complexity of the issue, it is sufficient for this study to consider the concepts of default case and unmarked case as synonyms that reflect the “emergence of the unmarked” in the functional sense.

3. Data

12The data of this study come from three collections of Late Latin charters:

  1. Tablettes Albertini (TA), 31 North-African private documents from between AD 493 – 496, published by Courtois et al. (1952);

  2. Ravenna papyri (RP), 59 Italian private and public documents mainly from the 6th century, published by Tjäder (1955-1982);

  3. Late Latin Charter Treebank (LLCT), a machine-readable, morphologically and syntactically parsed corpus of 519 charters (198,714 words) from Tuscany from between AD 714 and 869. The LLCT documents, as well as those of TA and RP, deal mostly with buying or selling landed property. The technical description of LLCT can be found in Korkiakangas and Passarotti (2011).

13A cursory research will be sufficient for TA and RP, which contain only a few accusatives in the subject function, while a detailed corpus study will be performed on LLCT, which displays a considerable number of accusative subjects.

4. Extended accusative

14In Classical as well as Late Latin, the accusative appears in extra-syntactic positions, where it is not expected to appear in N/A systems. In Late Latin, the accusative is found even as the subject of finite verbs. This phenomenon is called the “extended accusative”. In the following, I present some examples of accusatives appearing in nominal clauses and as subjects. They are taken from Cennamo (2009), Rovai (2012), and Adams (2013). “SO subject” stands for the subject of an unaccusative intransitive verb, “SA subject” for the subject of an unergative intransitive verb, and “A subject” for the subject of a transitive verb.

(1)

Me infelicem et scelestam! (Plaut. Cist. 685; 3rd/2nd c. BC)

‘Oh, me unhappy and cursed!’

(2)

Ius in sarda: piper, origanum, mentam, cepam, aceti modicum et oleum. (Apic. 9, 10, 3; 4th c. AD)

Sauce for sardine: pepper, oregano, mint, onion, a little vinegar, and oil.’

(3)

Potionem ad eos qui sanguinem meient (Chiron 822; 4th c. AD)

A drink for those who pass blood’

(4)

SO subject, impersonal:

Incerte errat animus: praeter propter vitam vivitur. (Enn. Trag. 248; 3rd/2nd c. BC)

The mind wanders aimlessly: one lives life only so-so.’

(5)

SO subject, unaccusative:

Nascitur ei genuorum contractionem et claudicationem. (Chiron 516)

Its knees are developing a contraction and limp.’

(6)

SA subject, unergative:

Si sequenter ipsum currit… (Lex Alamannorum 94, 3, cod. A; c. AD 720)

If he runs away subsequently…

(7)

A subject, transitive:

Fontem vero, ubi testa saniam radebat, quater in anno colorem mutat. (Egeria 13, 1, Excerpta Matritiensia 20-25; 4th c. AD)

Indeed, the fountain, where he scraped the pus with a crock, changes its colour four times a year.’

(8)

A subject, transitive:

nec hoc quod eos quesierunt habere debent. (Lex Curiensis 2, 9; 8th c. AD)

‘… and they should not get what they have asked.

15With exclamations, accusative is attested from very early on, as seen in the Plautine example (1) (Pinkster, 2015, p. 364-5). The accusative is also used in independent lists (2) and headings (3), where one can conjecture a verb, although it is not necessary, as the accusatives seem to be semantically motivated regardless. I will not reckon (1) to (3) among extended accusatives because they appear to be an established part of the Latin grammatical toolkit. Nevertheless, these uses seem to anticipate the extension of the accusative to clearly syntactic environments. In number (4), vitam is often viewed as a cognate object of the impersonal construction (e.g. Pinkster, 2015, p. 268-9), but can also be interpreted as a subject reanalysed as an object, as Cennamo (2009), suggests. In (5), there are accusative-form subjects attached to an unaccusative, intransitive verb, which denotes change of state. Number (6) is an example of an accusative-form pronoun subject with unergative verb, and (7) and (8) are claimed to be examples of accusative subject with transitive constructions.

  • 6 Adams (2013, p. 254-6) claims, instead, that the extension of the accusative cannot be explained by (...)

16It is noteworthy that examples (1) to (3) can be explained as resulting from default case assignment. I argue, however, that the extended accusative and markedness are tightly intertwined in all the examples. Indeed, Cennamo (2009) and Vincent (1997) have suggested that the default use of the accusative is the reason of the extension of accusative from nominal clauses to more and more verb-like and transitive constructions. According to Cennamo (2009, p. 327), the accusative alternates with the nominative in the encoding of non-active “neutral” participants, i.e. those “at rest” in the clause.6

17Before presenting my findings from LLCT, I will summarise in the following what is meant by the morphosyntactic alignment and which kind of realignment is supposed to have taken place in Late Latin.

5. Alignment types

18In N/A alignment, which was predominant in Classical Latin, the subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs (A and S) are opposed to the object of the transitive verb (O) as for their case form. Both A and S are encoded by the nominative and O by the accusative. Ergative/absolutive alignment is the mirror image of N/A alignment: the subjects of transitive verbs (A) are opposed to the other nuclear arguments (S and O). A is encoded by a case that is conventionally called the ergative and the other nuclear argument with a case called the absolutive.

19Some languages split nuclear argument S into two semantically-motivated arguments, SA and SO. SA represents the semantically active, agentive Actor macrorole, and formally aligns with A. SO, instead, is the semantically inactive, non-agentive, Undergoer macrorole, and formally aligns with O, hence the name active/inactive alignment, which is used along with “semantically-based alignment”, a term proposed among others by Rovai, 2012. Rovai states that the semantically-based alignment manifests itself through the SO subjects, which often occur with unaccusative verbs. Because SO subjects typically are inanimate nouns (examples (4), (5), and (7)), the extension of the accusative to the subject function can be best observed in the low-animacy domains of Latin (Rovai, 2012, p. 112). The extended accusatives which are found in contexts such as those in examples (4) to (8) suggest a limited presence of semantically-motivated alignment in Late Latin. It was apparently only a transitory stage in the realignment process of Latin grammatical relations, whose outcome was the neutralised alignment of the modern Romance languages (except Romanian) with no case contrast. That the alleged semantically-based alignment does not show completely in the extant sources is supposed to be due to the conservativeness of the written code.

20Cross-linguistically, it has been noticed that the N/A alignment implies markedness of O and unmarkedness of A. Conversely, semantically-based alignment usually implies markedness of A and unmarkedness of O (Plank, 1985, p. 301-2). Thus, a good point of departure is to consider the Classical Latin nominative to be the unmarked case. From a typological perspective, postulating a semantically-based alignment in Late Latin implies a markedness change somewhere between Classical and Late Latin.

6. Evidence from LLCT

21Next I will demonstrate how the LLCT data support the existence of a mainly semantically-based alignment in Late Latin. Table 1 presents the case distribution of the 3rd declension imparisyllabic subjects. The imparisyllabic nouns, such as pars (acc. partem), are resistant to the morphophonological levelling: they are able to maintain the N/A contrast because their nominative and accusative forms still differ from each other in LLCT (pars, acc. parte(m)). Instead, with parisyllabic nouns, such as testis ‘witness’ (acc. testem), it is difficult to tell whether forms like testi derive from the nominative or from the accusative due to the phonetic erosion of the word-final sounds. The below table shows the cross-tabulation between case (N/A) and animacy/referentiality class, which features three levels: inanimate common nouns (e.g. pars ‘part’), animate common nouns (e.g. homo ‘man’), personal names (e.g. Wileradu) (cf. Croft, 2003, p. 130). Although personal names are animate, they are treated separately because they are supposed to be more agentive than the animate common (non-personal) nouns.

  • 7 For the interpretation of the adjusted standardised residuals, see Agresti, 2007, p. 38-39.

Table 1: Dependence between subject case and animacy/referentiality class (3rd decl. imparisyllabic subjects)7

Case

Animacy

Total

inanimate

animate

personal

nominative

N

173

118

10

301

%

69.2%

90.1%

91%

76.8%

residual7

-4.7

4.4

1.1

accusative

N

77

13

1

91

%

31%

10%

c. 10%

23%

residual

4.7

-4.4

-1.1

Total

N

250

131

11

392

Chi-square

χ2 = 22.28, df = 2, p < 0.001

22Table 1 shows that the accusative percentage of the inanimate subjects is considerably higher (31%) than those of the animate common noun and personal name subjects (both about 10%). The fact that these animate and personal name subjects do have accusatives in about 10% of cases is noteworthy. This may suggest that the alignment is not exclusively semantically-motivated.

23In the same way, Table 2 shows that the accusative percentage of the SO subjects of the unaccusative constructions (both active and passive) is higher (about 30%) than the accusative percentages of the A subjects of transitive constructions (15%) and of the SA subjects of the unergative constructions (about 10%). It is interesting that here the smallest percentage is not the A subjects but the SA subjects. This is likely to be related to the fact that the A subjects of LLCT are particularly low in transitivity, a topic which is, however, beyond the scope of this study.

Table 2: Dependence between subject case and construction type (3rd decl. imparisyllabic subjects)

Case

Construction type

Total

A

SA

SO

SO passive

nominative

N

124

25

123

29

301

%

85.5%

c. 90%

68.7%

c. 75%

76.8%

residual

3.1

1.6

-3.5

-0.7

accusative

N

21

3

56

11

91

%

15%

c. 10%

31%

c. 30%

23%

residual

-3.1

-1.6

3.5

0.7

Total

N

145

28

179

40

392

Chi-square

χ2 = 15.16, df = 3, p = 0.001

24It is obvious that the animacy/referentiality class of the subject and the construction type in which the subject occurs are not independent of each other. What I want to show with the above numbers is, however, that there seems to be a theory-compatible, systematic dependence between the subject case and the animacy as well as construction type categories, both of which have been proposed to be crucial factors in defining the extension of the accusative to the subject function. The accusative percentages of Tables 1 and 2 suggest an essentially semantically-based alignment for the Latin of LLCT. However, the successive evolutionary stages, i.e. the ergative/absolutive and the neutralised alignments, seem to be present as well: the SA and A subjects already display accusatives, albeit to a lesser degree (15% and c. 10%) than the SO subjects. On the other hand, the nominative is still the most common subject case, which is only to be expected in written texts, which, obviously, reflect the spoken language only imperfectly.

25The syntactic variable that describes the linear distance of the subject from the verbal head is, however, even more interesting for this paper. Figure 1 presents the accusative percentage of the LLCT subjects as a function of distance from verb. The number on the X-axis is the distance of the subject from the verb, measured as word positions. A negative value stands for preverbal subject position and a positive value for postverbal subject position.

Figure 1: Accusative percentage of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-20 to +20)

Figure 1: Accusative percentage of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-20 to +20)

26The oscillation of the percentage graph is considerable on the fringes of the graph, which results from the fact that there are only a few occurrences of subjects (1 to 10) at the extreme positions. Therefore, I choose only the range from -8 to +2 which contains most occurrences (i.e. more than 50 at each position; see Figure 2). This range has enough occurrences to make Pearson’s chi-square test possible. The most important point is the dive at positions -2 and, especially, at -1. At -1, the accusative percentage is only 17.8. In other words, over 80% of the immediately preverbal subjects are in the nominative.

Figure 2: Accusative percentage and frequency of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-8 to +2) (χ2 = 49.69, df = 9, p < 0.001)

Figure 2: Accusative percentage and frequency of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-8 to +2) (χ2 = 49.69, df = 9, p < 0.001)

27I suggest that, in the immediate preverbal position, the cohesion of the subject/verb combination is at its highest and that is why scribes succeeded in producing the marked case, i.e. the nominative better than in other places, where the unmarked default case tended to occur. Indeed the further from the verbal head the subject is, the more easily it seems to slip into the unmarked case form, i.e. the accusative. This observation is obviously connected to the idea of default case: in those contexts where the syntactic cohesion of the verbal nucleus is weakened, the accusative, i.e. the default case, occurs.

7. Default case and personal names

28Next, I examine briefly the other two charter corpora, TA from the late 5th century and RP from the 6th century, to show how these materials provide information on the markedness change. TA and RP still display a very classicising form of Latin, and the deviations from the classical standard appear mainly in the formula “blanks”, in which proper names were added, as well as in those few free sections where, for example, the borders of the sold real estate were defined.

29The extended accusative is found only seven times in TA, and is restricted to low-animacy and low-agentivity domains, such as in sentence (9) (Väänänen, 1965, p. 38). RP also has only a handful of accusative subjects. Instead, there are lots of extra-syntactic inventories of various things, and these are almost systematically in the accusative (10).

(9)

in quibus sunt […] siteciae arborem unam (TA 4, 7-8)

in which there are […] one pistachio tree

(10)

Item et in speciebus secundum divisionem argenti libras duas, hoc est […] butte minore valente siliquas duas […], falce missuria, […] (RP 8, 2, 5, AD 564)

Likewise, two pounds of silver in goods according to the inventory, i.e. a small barrel worth two siliquae […], a sickle, […]’

  • 8 Courtois et al., 1952, p. 74-5; Adams, 2013, p. 213-15.

30On this basis, it is evident that the realignment was under way at the time of TA and RP: although the accusative-form subjects are few, they are restricted to inanimate nouns. Naturally, the written code does not reveal the real extension of realignment. What is, however, even more interesting are the personal names and their attributes that often seem to be in the nominative, especially when filling in the formula blanks in TA, e.g. (11).8

(11)

ego Lucianus petitus a Maxinus benditor (TA 9, 24)

‘I, Lucianus, (who was) asked by Maxinus, the seller’

  • 9 It is true that the unmarked default case of personal names was the nominative also in the Classica (...)

31This kind of case distribution makes sense: the fruit trees or barrels, as in (9) and (10), are low in agentivity, and therefore the first and the foremost to indicate a semantically-based system. The personal names, instead, are prototypically highly agentive and the nominative is the case of the Agent both in the N/A and semantically-based alignments. Thus, it is no surprise that in a semantically-based alignment the marked case form is realised in the personal names or, in other words, the default case of personal names is nominative due to their agentivity.9

32As for the chronology, no accusative-form animate or SA/A subject is attested in TA or RP (5th to 6th century), whereas they are found in LLCT (8th to 9th century). In general, there are only a few sporadic attestations of accusative-form animate or SA/A subjects in the entire Latinity of the earlier centuries (see (7)). In TA, the nominative seems to be the default case of the agentive personal names. Instead, in LLCT even the default case of the personal names which are utilised to fill in blanks is usually accusative (12).

(12)

Manifestum est mihi Ferdualdum filio bone memorie Richiprandi quia… (LLCT: MED 195; AD 784)

It is manifest to me, Ferdualdus, son of the late Richiprandus, that…’

33On these grounds, it seems plausible to state that ultimate markedness change, including the personal names, took place somewhere between the 5th and 8th centuries although it had certainly begun earlier with inanimate nouns. At the same time, morphosyntactic realignment was going on and seems to have surpassed partly the semantically-based stage at the time of LLCT (8th to 9th century); the accusative had already extended to SA and even A subjects, and appears as the default case of the personal names in formula blanks.

8. Conclusion

34I conclude that in the 5th and 6th centuries the semantically-driven realignment was in all likelihood going on, but did not yet manifest itself very clearly in written texts because of the scribes’ education and classicising aspirations. Likewise, at that time the markedness change is still likely to have been under way. Although the default case form of the inanimate nouns was already the accusative, the default form of the agentive personal names in the formula blanks still seems to be the nominative. Instead, during the 8th and 9th centuries the semantically-based alignment is still visible, but the successive evolutionary stages appear to be present as well. The accusative is already the unmarked and default case even in most personal names.

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Bibliographie

Adams, J. N., 2013, Social Variation and the Latin Language, Cambridge.

Agresti, A., 2007, An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis, Hoboken (2nd ed.).

Andersen, H., 2001, Markedness and the theory of linguistic change, in H. Andersen (ed.), Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, p. 21-57.

Cennamo, M., 2009, Argument structure and alignment variations and changes in Late Latin, in J. Barðdal and S. L. Chelliah (eds.), The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case, Amsterdam, p. 307-346.

Courtois, C., Leschi, L., Perrat, C., and Saumagne, C., 1952, Tablettes Albertini: actes privés de l’époque vandale (fin du ve siècle), Paris (= TA).

Croft, W., 2003, Typology and Universals, Cambridge (2nd ed.).

Frazier, M., 2007, Default Case in OT Syntax, draft, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/941-1207/941-FRAZIER-0-0.PDF)

Korkiakangas, T. and Passarotti, M., 2011, Challenges in Annotating Medieval Latin Charters, Journal of Language Technology and Computational Linguistics 26 (2), p. 103-114.

LLCT: Late Latin Charter Treebank. Collection of Tuscan Charters from AD 714-869. Available on request from the author.

Pinkster, H., 2015, The Oxford Latin Syntax, vol. 1: The Simple Clause, Oxford.

Plank, F., 1985, The extended accusative/restricted nominative in perspective, in F. Plank (ed.), Relational Typology, Berlin / New York, p. 269-310.

Rovai, F., 2012, Sistemi di codifica argomentale: tipologia ed evoluzione, Pisa.

Schütze, C. T., 2001, On the nature of default case, Syntax 4 (3), p. 205-238.

Smith, J. C., 2011, Change and continuity in form-function relationships, in M. Maiden et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages 1, Cambridge, p. 268-317.

Tjäder, J.-O., 1955-1982, Die nichtliterarischen Lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700, vol. 1-2, Lund (= RP).

Väänänen, V., 1965, Étude sur le texte et la langue des Tablettes Albertini, Helsinki.

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Notes

2 E.g. Plank, 1985; Cennamo, 2009; Rovai, 2012.

3 Note that, contrary to the convention of English grammar, in this paper “nominal clause” denotes a non-elliptic verbless construction with NPs only. See Schütze, 2001, below.

4 Plank, 1985, p. 291; Cennamo, 2009, p. 327-8; Rovai, 2012, p. 104.

5 It is true that for example in Latin the 1st declension displays unmarked nominative forms (-a vs. acc. -am), which makes the system a mixed one.

6 Adams (2013, p. 254-6) claims, instead, that the extension of the accusative cannot be explained by assuming the accusative to be the default case of Latin. This position seems justified as regards the early stages of the Latinity, whereas there seems to be no doubt that a default-changing markedness turn took place in Late Latin.

7 For the interpretation of the adjusted standardised residuals, see Agresti, 2007, p. 38-39.

8 Courtois et al., 1952, p. 74-5; Adams, 2013, p. 213-15.

9 It is true that the unmarked default case of personal names was the nominative also in the Classical N/A system. The point is, however, that at the time of TA the extension of the accusative had not yet fully reached the personal names.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Accusative percentage of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-20 to +20)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/pallas/docannexe/image/3763/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 38k
Titre Figure 2: Accusative percentage and frequency of subjects as a function of distance from verb in LLCT (-8 to +2) (χ2 = 49.69, df = 9, p < 0.001)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/pallas/docannexe/image/3763/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 33k
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Timo Korkiakangas, « Morphosyntactic realignment and markedness change in Late Latin: Evidence from charter texts »Pallas [En ligne], 102 | 2016, mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2016, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/pallas/3763 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/pallas.3763

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Auteur

Timo Korkiakangas

PhD student, University of Helsinki
timo.korkiakangas@helsinki.fi

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