On verb placement in Colloquial Latin: a Cartographic study of Claudius Terentianus' letters

• Grant number: 25/01065-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Aquiles Tescari Neto
• Grantee: Ana Letícia Riffo Wechsler
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to study the position of the verb (V) in its various forms in colloquial Latin, based on a corpus of six letters written by the Roman soldier Claudius Terentianus in the early second century CE. The language of these letters is characteristically "vulgar" (Adams, 1977; Strassi, 2017), that is, akin to popular and essentially oral varieties of Latin, which are believed to have given rise to the Romance languages (Ilari, 1992; Bassetto, 2001). The investigation of the position of the V adopts the theoretical framework of the Principles and Parameters Theory (Chomsky, 1982, 1986) and, in particular, the Cartographic approach (Cinque, 1999; Rizzi, 1997; Cinque and Rizzi, 2010) regarding both verb movement to inflection in the IP field (Belletti, 1990; Cinque, 1999; Tescari Neto, 2013, forthcoming; Schifano, 2018; among others) and the structure of V2 languages, which involve additional verb movement to a CP head (see, for instance, Morais, 1995; Pinto, 2011; Wolfe, 2015; Galves, 2020). We take into account the possibility, pointed out by Ledgeway (2017), that colloquial Latin already exhibited some type of V2 system, similar to that found in medieval Romance languages. Thus, the objectives of this study are: (i) to investigate the structural position occupied by the verb forms attested in the corpus, whether this position be in IP or in CP; (ii) to verify whether the data are compatible with a V2 system and, if so, what type of V2; (iii) to compare the structure and linear order of the sentences in the letters with those attested in other varieties of Latin and in early Romance; and, based on these findings, (iv) to outline possible implications of the results for the diachrony of verb placement in Latin and in Romance languages. To this end, a quantitative survey will be conducted on the superficial linear position of the V in different verb forms, in both main and subordinate clauses, followed by a qualitative analysis to pinpoint the V's structural position in each case. (AU)