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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. 181–210

Chapter 9
Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Pragmatic structure and word order of the Greek translation

| Autonomous University of Madrid

This paper analyzes the word order of the Greek text of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti and compares it with the word order of the original Latin version. This comparison shows that the predominant word order in the Greek text largely coincides with the basic patterns previously proposed for literary texts. Second, that there is a high degree of coincidence between the word order patterns of the Latin and the Greek versions of this text. However, there are discrepancies in a number of cases. These discrepancies are analyzed in detail and some explanations are proposed for them.

Keywords: Res Gestae Divi Augusti , topic, focus, setting, word order, pragmatic functions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Word order in Ancient Greek: Basic assumptions
  • 3.Word order patterns in the RGDA
    • 3.1The basic template
    • 3.2Second template
  • 4.The Greek text compared with the Latin original
    • 4.1Change in the syntactic construction
    • 4.2Cases which provide indirect evidence of Greek word order
    • 4.3Changes originating from the differences between pragmatic templates of Latin and Greek, respectively
    • 4.4A particular tendency to split complex Focus
    • 4.5Particular cases with no apparent pragmatic motivation
    • 4.6Some problematic cases
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.190.09vil
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