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Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
Edited by Camille Denizot and Olga Spevak
[Studies in Language Companion Series 190] 2017
► pp. 113–136

Chapter 6
Constituent order in directives with stative verbs in Latin

| University of Santiago de Compostela

This paper considers constituent ordering in monovalent and bivalent constructions of two Latin stative verbs – sum ‘to be’ and fio ‘to become’ – when they appear in directives, assessing the degree of speaker-addressee interaction. We use Risselada’s classification of the different subtypes of directives based on the extent to which compliance with what the speaker expresses is obligatory. The findings reveal that, given (i) the difference in the number of arguments and in semantic content of monovalent and bivalent structures, and (ii) the incidence of modality (declarative/directive), the order of constituents different in each case. Furthermore, tendencies in constituent patterns are more uniform when expressions are more prototypically directive, although not in a wholly scalar way. Hence, the peculiarities or deviations observed require specific explanations, such as the structure of “world-creation”, the kind of proposal made, or the existence of expressions with different degrees of lexicalization.

Keywords: Latin, directives, pragmatics, speech act, stative verbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction. Objectives, structure, and corpus
  • 2.Illocutionary force and verbal mood
  • 3.Brief overview of research
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Monovalent constructions
      • 4.1.1‘Advice’ and ‘supplications’
      • 4.1.2‘Proposals’
    • 4.2Bivalent structures
      • 4.2.1‘Advice’
      • 4.2.2‘Proposals’
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.190.06cab
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