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Part of
Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
Edited by Camille Denizot and Olga Spevak
[Studies in Language Companion Series 190] 2017
► pp. 159–180

Chapter 8
Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Word order and pragmatics of the Latin original

| Autonomous University of Madrid

This paper explores word order (WO) in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (RGDA), a non-literary text, and offers a basis for both, a comparison between Word Order in literary and non-literary texts, and a comparison between Latin and Greek. After studying different positions occupied by the basic pragmatic functions and by the Verb, it concludes that the pragmatic roles display a strong tendency to occupy fixed spots, in particular: the initial position, preferred by the (New) Topic, the preverbal position, usually occupied by the Focus, and the final position, often filled by the Verb. The preverbal position is highly relevant: any material in preverbal position shows salience. The Tails are used to add information about either the New Topic or the Focus. This means that the right periphery is treated as a salient position.

Keywords: pragmatics, word order, pragmatic functions, new topic, focus, tail, Augustus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical basis
  • 3.Overview of pragmatic constellation of WO in RGDA
    • 3.1Text and context of RGDA
    • 3.2Pragmatic analysis of the text
    • 3.3Some examples
  • 4.Particular cases
    • 4.1Forms of the pronoun ego
    • 4.2Other cases: Topics in preverbal position?
  • 5.Constituents in postverbal position: Tails
    • a.Absolute Ablatives (AA) as in Example (22):
    • b.Relative clauses, like (23) and (24):
    • c.Participle constructions in agreement with the Subject, as in (25):
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.190.08tor
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