Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information, by A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, publ Oxford University Press 2006, pp xii + 639, h/b, ISBN 978 0 19 518168 5. c.£79 (Amazon).
This substantial and scholarly tome may have passed many by (as it did me), and the price may have had something to do with it. It is difficult to come by, but I secured my essentially pristine second-hand copy, priced at the time by Amazon at £102, for the bargain sum of £65 from a dealer in Edinburgh, via Abebooks.com, a site I recommend if you are seeking out hard-to-find editions. LWO is published by the New York arm of OUP, D. and S. being classicists at Stanford and Chapel Hill, North Carolina respectively. Unusually, personal details of their occupations and pedigree are modestly absent from the volume itself. In fact the authors have a long history of published collaboration in this specialist field, going back to Language and Metre: Resolution, Porson’s Bridge and Their Prosodic Basis (1984) via Semantics for Latin (2013), The Prosody of Greek Speech (2009), and Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek (2000); unlikely to make Tesco’s top ten list, I know, butI can guarantee, having explored this volume and being halfway through The Prosody of Greek Speech, that you will find lots of nuggets of interesting information scattered throughout. On p37 of LWO, for example, you will learn that in a survey of four hundred languages the subject came first (at the ‘left periphery’) in 85% of them. In Northern Pomo, a Californian Indian language, different pronouns are used with the verb ‘to belch’ according to whether the action is voluntary or involuntary. The same applies to getting drunk in the Northern Caucasian language Tsova-Tush (p9). I could go on at length, but you get the picture. References to modern foreign languages, obscure and less obscure, are sprinkled throughout.
LWO is not a light read for the faint-hearted. D. and S. are clearly not just classicists but are also au fait with modern technical linguistics (especially generative grammar), and the need to be upto speed in both these fields may account for the paucity of reviews in the specialist journals. The authors appreciate this, and for the benefit of technical linguists the thousands of illustrative Latin quotes are translated at the foot of each page, whilst latinate readers may be tempted to skip over the ‘structural analysis’ component of the various sections. Some linguistic notations and conventions are explained in the introduction, but I had trouble getting my head round these, though I was intrigued by the similarity of the many tree-diagrams to those depicting manuscript traditions found in modern critical editions of classical texts. But if you understand what’s meant by ‘A left branch quantifier or restrictive adjective can cause the genitive to raise to an unfocused prehead position via the left node rule’ (p324), this aspect of LWO will be right up your street. The subject of Latin word order receives only passing comment, if at all, in the grammar books we have all used and to which we constantly refer to check up on abstruse points. We are tempted to accord them iconic status, and their pronouncements tend to be perpetuated down through the generations. Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, though revised in 1930, dates back to his Elementary Latin Primer of 1843. Gildersleeve and Lodge started off in 1867, and Allen and Greenough in 1888. The point being made is that things have moved on since the Franco-Prussian war. The victorians knew their stuff through first-hand familiarity with the texts, and realised, for example, that, globally speaking, Latin adjectives preceded their nouns and that, in Greek, ‘genitive sandwiches’ were the exception rather than the rule. Not only has the technical science of linguistics emerged during the twentieth century, but the easy accessibility of digital textual databases such as Perseus and Logeion has accelerated the modern study of those topics explored by D. and S. What is impressive is that the authors actually appreciate the context of their many hundreds of illustrative citations and this enables them to eschew rash generalisations.
There is a distinction between semantic syntax, which simply conveys meaning, and pragmatic syntax, which conveys information assuming prior knowledge of context by the reader or listener. The current Mrs Bass and I have had a classy home office built in our back garden; downsizing in retirement from a large school house to a bungalow has proved a challenge. We are having blinds fitted to the windows and glass doors, and are awaiting a quote from the person who came in to measure up and suggest the various options. We refer to him as ‘the blind man’. In Latin, pragmatic syntax is encoded by word order. In written English, pragmatic meaning can be lost. In spoken English, the speaker conveys pragmatic meaning by means of prosody – stress and intonation. The English example cited (p5) is:
She only likes Latin verse.
Oral stress on Latin indicates she’s not keen on Greek verse; stress on verse indicates she’s not keen on Latin prose. Latin uses word order, sometimes combined with prosody, to encode these fine distinctions, and ignoring such syntax when reading a paragraph of Latin is akin to taking a monochrome rather than colour photograph. LWO combines traditional classical philology with modern linguistic analysisto scrutinise collections of word order patterns and how these determine pragmatic meaning; basically, what does this sentence mean? We are encouraged throughout to avoid the ‘bad old habit of ignoring [the] word order of Latin’ (p524). Syntax is the ‘interface between word order and meaning’ (p25).
This is not a volume to be read from cover to cover, but is one to dip in to in search of answers to specific points. Althoughthere is an exhaustive (19-page) bibliography (biased towards the technical linguistic side of things), an index nominum and an index rerum, I really missed an index verborum as well as an index locorum (the system of abbreviations used for canonical Latin authorial references is idiosyncratic), though scanning through the detailed contents pages will guide you in the right direction. To quote some random soundings
Under ‘Adverbs of manner’ (p101) the positioning of celeriter is analysed, bearing in mind it can be both an adverb of manner (‘with great velocity’) or temporal (‘without delay’). Caesar tends to put aciem in front of the verb (e.g. Caesar aciem instruxit), whereas Livy puts it after (e.g. promovit aciem)(p127). The subtle difference within a sentence between interfectus est and est interfectus is analysed (p189). And, still on the subject of perfect passives (p183), the negative non usually appears before the auxiliary, not the participle; hence ‘she was not seen’ would not be non visa est, but visa non est. In terms of genitives (subjective, objective, partitive) no rules apply, word order being determined by the actual lexical item. For example, uxor usually precedes its genitive, but filius follows it. The majority of citations are from Livy, Cicero and Caesar, though in analysing adjectival positions (p403f.) Cato (de agri cultura) and Columella (de re rustica and de arboribus) come into play, since they deal with a similar topic (agriculture) and therefore overlap in vocabulary, but are separated by two hundred years, thus allowing a diachronic perspective of how the syntax changed over this period. Latin verse, of course, is a completely different ball game, and doesn’t feature in any detail here.