Chiara Gianollo

Labile verbs in Late Latin

Abstract The paper discusses the phenomenon of Late Latin intransitivizations, where a morphologically active form of a transitive verb is used with a middle-passive function. Intransitivizations are present throughout the history of the language, but their number increases significantly in the 3rd–4th century CE. They are instances of patient-preserving lability and represent one of the possible means to express the anticausative alternation. The analysis casts intransitivizations into the broader context of voice fluctuations in Late Latin, by comparing them with competing constructions and by examining the possible causes for their increase in frequency during the Late Latin stage.

Middle Voice in Latin and the phenomenon of Split Intransitivity

Summary The aim of this paper is to draw a sketch of the verbal voice system in Latin and possibly to shed more light on some controversial points (in particular, the status of deponent verbs (DVs)), by means of a comparison between middle voice (MV) and Split Intransitivity.

Competing constructions for inalienable possession in the Vulgate Gospels: translator's choices and grammatical constraints

Abstract I examine the use of a special genitive construction to express inalienable possession in the Greek New Testament, and the strategies to translate it in the Latin Vulgate. The survey reveals a clash between various faithfulness criteria in translation, and presents the different reactions of the Latin translator, showing how discrepancies arise in a domain where the grammatical resources of the two languages sharply differ.

Bilingualism and the Latin language, by James N. Adams

The occasion for this review is offered by the publication in 2008 of the paperback edition of J. N. Adams’s Bilingualism and the Latin language, following the first hardback edition in 2003. While no changes or additions have been made (which indirectly attests a very accurate editing work on such complicated material in the first place), the appearance of the new paperback edition will favor a wider distribution for the book, and its presence also on the shelves of non-specialists. This is, therefore, a good opportunity to acknowledge and discuss recent, highly qualified research on the history of Latin in the broader setting of theoretical diachronic linguistics and typological investigation, thus going beyond the field of sociolinguistic studies that Adams has in mind. Adams’s motivating goal in Bilingualism and the Latin language is to exploit advances in modern sociolinguistics to systematically address bilingual situations involving Latin across various phases of Roman civilization, from the Republican age to the fourth century CE. The book is extremely rich in terms of documentation and argumentation, and I will not aim here to give a comprehensive overview, taking instead a specific perspective.1 The question from which I will start, in reviewing this monumental work, is: Which aspects of Adams’s book assume particular relevance for a linguist with typological interests? Language contact in the ancient Mediterranean area is a topic of great typological significance: we are aware that koiné languages, such as Hellenistic Greek and Latin, must have had decisive effects on linguistic diversity in their areas of influence, but we know little about the dynamics of such effects. Adams’s book offers a unique opportunity to explore this issue, following the ascent of Latin throughout the centuries of the Empire, and showing in which ways and to what extent it affected the development, and in some cases the existence itself, of neighboring languages.