Figure 1 - uploaded by Simon Aerts
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Interpreting grammatical aspect as a category that conveys meaning on three dimensions might serve to better understand and appreciate the semantic potential of the narrative tenses in Latin historiography. Similarly to Livy's, Gregory of Tours' language features a number of 'tense uses' where aspect plays a decisive role. However, the rise of morp...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... those who had scorned his warnings, died miserably in Provence. Figure 1 shows the difference in distribution of the relevant tenses between Livy and Gregory for those 'past anterior events' that serve as background to an established temporal anchor, or 'reference point'; usually, they occur in an informative subordinate clause (e.g. a relative clause, as in (2)) or a main clause introduced by the explanatory nam or enim (causal 'for'). Here and in other Figures, the tenses highlighted in black involve the most conspicuous discontinuities. ...
Context 2
... illustrated in (2) and Figure 1, regular past anterior background events occur most often in clauses with the indicative mood, with the preference for the (old) pluperfect over the (old) perfect tense shifting from almost absolute (34 against 1) to nearly nonexistent (19 against 17) between Livy's and Gregory's texts. To the morphological innovations (i.e. ...
Context 3
... shown in Figure 2, Livy already used perfect indicatives such as vidit in (3) instead of the pluperfect indicative more often with this subtype of past anteriors (e.g. with ubi temporale or postquam; 27 against 11) than with regular, i.e. noncircumstantial, past anterior events (cf. Figure 1; 1 against 34). Figure 2 also shows that in Gregory's language, past anterior circumstantial events were found almost exclusively in subordinate clauses where the subjunctive is obligatory (e.g. cum historicum; 25 subj. ...
Context 4
... from the increased use of the perfect tense 'pro plusquamperfecto', Figure 1 and Figure 2 also indicate a considerably increased use of the innovation deletus fuerat for predicates with the default values of the pluperfect. However, since that new formation only concerns passive forms (including deponentia), the data for active and nonactive forms should be compared separately. ...
Citations
... See Aerts (2021a, 2021b for further reading. 17 Note that for Augustinus (n = 9) and Hieronymus (n = 2), 7 out of 11 data points (or 63.6 %) in our sample are ingressives. ...
After the merger of the perfect and aorist stems, the resulting perfectum stem in Latin kept its less central functions such as resultativity and ingressivity as marked aspectual meanings in its semantic potential. Occurring first in literary and especially poetic text, as a dormant, archaic function, its use was revived in the 4th century due to intensifying exchanges with New Testament Greek, where the ingressive aorist was still more productive. The current paper examines, on the basis of a representative sample selected from all relevant time periods and various text types, perfectum stem forms of a substantial number of stative verbs in a close-reading process, in order to ascertain more accurately the dynamics of the diachrony of Latin ingressivity. The occurrence rate of this form-function pairing is compared to significant alternations of a number of contextual factors, such as discourse type, mood, predicate fronting and the dynamics in the system of lexical ingressivity.
