Dormivit et resurgit. A language-ecology approach to the diachrony of the Latin ingressive perfect

Abstract

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.

Full text

Simon Aerts*
Dormivit et resurgit. A language-ecology
approach to the diachrony of the Latin
ingressive perfect
https://doi.org/10.1515/joll-2024-2006
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: corpus semantics; ingressive; language ecology; Latin tense system;
tense-aspect
1 Introduction
In Ancient Greek, one of the potential semantic functions of the aorist tense was the
expression of INGRESSIVITY. With stative verbs such as βασιλεύω ‘to be king’, the aorist
tense ἐβασίλευσα could be used to signify ‘I became king’. The tenses of the perfect
stem, on the other hand, were used with intransitive verbs to express the state that
resulted from a previously completed action: τέθνηκα did not mean ‘I (have) died’
so much as ‘I am (now) dead’. In Latin, however, long before the time of the oldest
texts that came down to us, these two stems merged into the new perfectum stem
following a process where their central functions had converged into the expression
*Corresponding author: Simon Aerts, Department of Linguistics (Latin Section), Ghent University,
Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium, E-mail: Simon.Aerts@UGent.be
Journal of Latin Linguistics 2024; 23(1–2): 21–50
Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

of a past action.
1
Beyond that central function, the perfectum stem tenses kept the
more marginal functions of both the aorist stem and the perfect stem. On the one
hand, (plu)perfect forms such as constiterant in (1) and remansit in (2) have the value
of past and present simultaneous states, respectively. In (1), from Livy’s 1st-century
account of the Battle at Cannae, the ablative absolute with the present participle
prominente is simultaneous to the situation of the Africans standing on both sides,
rather than to the anterior action of them taking position there, while in (2), from a
dialogue in Gregory of Tours’6th-century account on the usurper Gundovald, the
relative clause with the present subjunctive possit highlights the alleged current
hopeless state of things in Gaul.
(1) (LIV. 22, 47, 4–10; trans. Loeb but altered significantly to reflect the Latin
syntax)
Impulsis deinde ac trepide referentibus pedem institere ac tenore uno per
praeceps pauore fugientium agmen in mediam primum aciem inlati, postremo
nullo resistente ad subsidia Afrorum peruenerunt, qui utrimque reductis alis
constiterant media, qua Galli Hispanique steterant, aliquantum prominente
acie.
‘When subsequently these had been made to give way and were retreating in
confusion, the Romans started to press on, and, after they had first been
brought with one movement through the headlong crowd of panic-stricken
fleeing foes into the center of the enemy lines, finally, since no one offered
resistance, reached the African supports, who were standing on both sides
with the wings drawn back, while the middle line, where the Gauls and
Spaniards had stood, projected somewhat.’
(2) (GREG.TVR. Franc. 7, 36; trans. mine)
“Scimus enim omnes, te filium esse Chlothacharii, nec remansit in Galliis qui
regnum illum regere possit, nisi tu advenias.”
‘“For we all know that you are the son of Clothacharius, and there is no one
left in Gaul who could rule that kingdom, unless you come.”’
On the other hand, stative verbs such as teneo ‘to hold (e.g. a position)’in (3) are found
in the perfect tense tenuit with the meaning ‘to take (a position)’.
(3) (CAES. civ. 3, 43, 1; trans. mine)
Erant enim circum castra Pompei permulti editi atque asperi colles. Hos
primum praesidiis tenuit castellaque ibi communiit.
‘Around Pompey’s camp there was a large number of steep, rough hills. First
he began to hold these with garrisons and there he fortified forts.’
1Clackson (2007: 121–122), Meiser (2003: 83), Prosdocimi and Marinetti (1993: 237–238).
22 Aerts

Although Pinkster (2021: 449) seeks to refute claims of such an ingressive meaning for
tenuit in (3) by stating that it simply has the same function as communiit (i.e. a
narrative perfect), Aerts (2021b: 183–184) has shown that for a stative verb such as
teneo to function as a foreground event, a conversion of the state of affairs into an
event of some kind has to take place. By means of the marked aspectual meaning of
INGRESSIVITY, the event of ‘entering into’the state is profiled, as illustrated by the
awkward literal English translation: a praesidium ‘garrison’usually refers to a group
of soldiers used to hold a position, not take it; and in fact, the state of affairs is holding
the hills with a garrison, the ‘ingression’of which is simply profiled by the use of the
perfect tense.
2
At this point, it should be noted that ingressive meanings can be signified both by
grammatical means, in the manner described above, and by lexical means. As
extensively studied by Haverling (e.g. 2003, 2013, 2018), a number of affixes are found
to impose an ingressive reading on stative verbs (e.g. taceo-conticesco,sedeo-resido).
These lexical ingressives are not the focus of the current study, as we included in our
corpus queries lexemes both with and without affixed corradicals.
3
In some cases,
the co-occurrence of both types of ingressivity with verbs of the same root is
particularly revealing, as in (5), a 4th-century comment on a passage from Vergil (4).
(4) (VERG. Aen. 5, 286–290; trans. Loeb)
Hoc pius Aeneas misso certamine tendit
gramineum in campum, quem collibus undique curvis
cingebant silvae, mediaque in valle theatri
circus erat; quo se multis cum milibus heros
consessu medium tulit exstructoque resedit.
‘This contest sped, loyal Aeneas moves to a grassy plain, girt all about with
winding hills, well-wooded, where, at the heart of the valley, ran the circuit of
a theatre. To this spot, with many thousands, the hero betook himself into the
midst of the company and sat down on a raised seat.’
2In terms of terminology, we consciously distinguish between ‘INGRESSIVITY’(entering into a non-
dynamic state) and ‘INCHOATIVITY’(starting a dynamic, atelic activity), even though the two are not
always kept apart in the literature; cf. Bertinetto’s (1986: 230) definitions of ‘INGRESSIVITY’as covering
the entering into a state and the starting of an activity, and of ‘inchoativity’as the lexical means of
expressing ingressivity by means of affixation and/or the use of the reciprocal pronoun si (as studied
for Latin by Haverling [e.g. 2003, 2013, 2018]). See also https://glossary.sil.org/term/inchoative-aspect
(last accessed 17 May 2023).
3The distinction made in this paper between grammatical ingressivity and lexical ingressivity is
based solely on the fact that grammatical ingressivity is conveyed by a different form of the same
lexeme, while lexical ingressivity refers to the meaning expressed by a lexeme regardless of its form.
‘Lexeme’, then, is understood quite literally in the practical sense of (separate) dictionary entries.
The Latin ingressive perfect 23

(5) (CLAVD.DON. Aen. 5, 290 p. 455, 17–19; trans. mine)
Non dixit ‘sedit’, sed ‘resedit’, quod significat ‘iterum sedit’. Sed cum antea in
illo loco non sedisset, quomodo iterum sedit?
‘[Vergil] did not say sedit, but resedit, which means “he sat down again.”But
since [Aeneas] had not sat (down) in that spot before, how is it that he sat
down again?’
In Vergil’sAeneid ([4]), resedit simply meant ‘he sat down’, as an unmarked narrative
perfect of the verb resido ‘to sit down’. A few centuries later, Claudius Donatus
understood the verb as ‘to sit down again’, paraphrasing resedit as iterum sedit,
which entails that to him, the perfect sedit of the lexeme sedeo ‘to be seated’
potentially had the INGRESSIVE meaning ‘he sat down’(lit. ‘he began being seated’).
On grammatical INGRESSIVITY, Haverling (2018: 243) comments that it occurred in
the classical period mainly in poetic language, citing examples from Ovid (caluere
‘grew hot’in Met. 2, 171 and rubuerunt ‘grew red’in Met. 11, 19). In other publications,
the examples she chose to illustrate the re-emergence of grammatical INGRESSIVITY in
later Latin mostly involve Greek influence of some kind, such as biblical texts and
other translations from Greek (e.g. Haverling 2003: 129, 2010: 462). The renewed
productivity of the INGRESSIVE function is mentioned as a requirement at some stage in
the transition from Late Latin to Romance, where it is attested (Haverling 2010: 479).
However, it is not entirely clear from Haverling’s report (a) which lexemes were
included in her corpus queries and which lexemes were not, (b) which corpora were
searched and how, and (c) which authors, genres and time periods were included
in her corpus searches.
In that context, as part of a larger research project on the evolution of
form-function pairings in the history of the Latin tense system, this study aims to
supplement our current knowledge on the place of INGRESSIVITY in the Latin tense
system by exploring electronically available corpora and close-reading a randomly
selected sample of data points that is representative of Latin attested in various text
types from various stages in its development.
4
Section 2 presents this data and
the research parameters applied throughout the study. In Section 3, the model of
‘language ecology’is presented as a fruitful methodological framework to under-
stand the processes involved in the development of form-function pairings, both with
regard to INGRESSIVITY and to the Latin tense system as a whole. Section 4 presents the
bulk of the qualitative analysis leading to the conclusions in Section 5: in Section 4.1,
our focus is on language-external influences on the use of INGRESSIVITY in Latin texts,
such as those related to text type (especially poetry and the influence of register and
metre) and translating from Greek sources; in Section 4.2, we look at a number of
4The dataset is freely accessible as Aerts (2024).
24 Aerts

language-internal influences, such as the availability of corradical verbs where
INGRESSIVITY is expressed through affixes, the use of the form in the indicative versus
the subjunctive or infinitive, and pragmatic emphasis based on a conspicuous
fronting of the verb.
5
2 Data and research parameters
For this study, a total of 19 common stative verbs such as teneo ‘to hold, to be in
possession of’,haereo ‘to stick, to be stuck’,pendeo ‘to hang, to be hanging’,taceo ‘to
be silent’, and lateo ‘to be hidden’were selected for our corpus searches. The corpora
searched were the Opera Latina (operated by LASLA, accessed through Hyperbase
Web), the Library of Latin Texts (operated by BREPOLS), the PALAFRALAT corpus
(operated at the Portail BFM-TXM), a selection of inscriptions operated at the
Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss/Slaby, and the Codex Cavensis Diplomaticus (vol. 1).
The total corpus size is at least 35,000,000 words (see Table 1).
Since INGRESSIVITY is hypothesized to have been a residual meaning of the
perfectum stem after the merger between the perfect and aorist stems, all perfectum
forms of the 19 selected lexemes were included in our corpus queries (i.e. all existing
combinations of [i] the indicative, subjunctive and infinitive and [ii] the perfect,
pluperfect and future perfect tenses in the active). In Table 2, the relative frequencies
of each of these forms are shown for the two lexemes that occurred most often in our
corpora (teneo and timeo) and thus make up most of our dataset (36.5 %); for the other
17 lexemes in our dataset, these numbers are represented together (displaying no
dramatic deviations from the distribution of forms of teneo and timeo) for reasons of
space.
Table :Consulted corpora with characteristics.
Corpus Contents % of results (N=,)
LASLA –Hyperbase Classical, literary Latin (nd c. BCE –nd c. CE) . %(,)
PaLaFra-Lat-VTransition to Old French (th–th c.) . %()
LLT (Brepols) Antiquity but esp. patristic periods (rd c. BCE – CE) . %(,)
EDCS Epigraphic texts . %()
CDC (vol. ) Diplomatic charters (th–th c.) . %()
5Throughout this paper, the following abbreviations are used to identify certain tense forms: PR.IND.
(present indicative), IMPF.IND. (imperfect indicative), FUT.IND. (future indicative), PF.IND. (perfect
indicative), PLUP.IND. (pluperfect indicative), FUT.PF.IND (future perfect indicative), PR.SUBJ. (present
subjunctive), IMPF.SUBJ. (imperfect subjunctive), PF.SUBJ. (perfect subjunctive), PLUP.SUBJ. (pluperfect
subjunctive), PR.INF. (present infinitive), PF.INF. (perfect infinitive).
The Latin ingressive perfect 25

Note that these 14,472 data points do not constitute ingressives in the queried
corpora, but rather those forms of specific, stative lexemes that potentially convey
ingressive meaning –a potential of which the realization can only be examined
during a close-reading analysis. The choice of lexemes is broad but rather arbi-
trary, except that it was based on vocabulary lists for intermediate learners of
Latin, as these are meant to cover the most commonly occurring words. In any case,
our target lexemes include both (a) stative verbs that coexisted with corradical non-
stative verbs (e.g. taceo –conticesco), the relationship between which has been the
object of many studies by Haverling (cf. supra) and (b) stative verbs that did not
exist in a corradical pair. As may be clear from Table 2, for some of our corradical
pairs of stative and non-stative verbs, the perfectum stem is identical (sileo-silesco
‘to be silent –to grow silent’, pateo-patesco ‘to be open –to open’,ardeo-ardesco‘to
be on fire –to catch on fire’), making it impossible to distinguish between the
perfectum forms of the stative and those of the non-stative verb; as such, they were
excluded from further analysis.
6
In addition, two other lexemes share a perfectum
stem with lexemes of an altogether different meaning (paueo-pasco ‘to be afraid –
to herd’and fulgeo-fulcio ‘to be shining –to support’). Only the attestations of these
pairs that are included in our close-reading process, during which the intended
meaning of the form is revealed, play a role in any conclusions drawn from these
data.
3 Language-ecology: tracing INGRESSIVITY through
the ‘ecosystem’of the Latin tenses
As mentioned above, regarding the diachrony of INGRESSIVITY as a marked aspectual
meaning expressed by the Latin perfectum stem, Haverling (2018: 243) identifies a few
early attestations in poetic language; at a later stage, when grammatical INGRESSIVITY
must have regained momentum and some increased productivity (Haverling 2010:
479) as it was inherited in the Romance synthetic perfect (cf. Bertinetto 1986:
226–231), occurrences cited by Haverling (2003: 129, 2010: 462) mainly involve
some influence from Greek (e.g. Christian texts, translations). Associations between
6Note that the ingressive meaning would be a marked use of e.g. the perfect indicative with the
stative verb but an unmarked use with the dynamic verb. One could imagine a research context
where the likelihood of an author to use either one of the lexemes more often is examined (e.g. by
considering the relative productivity of both forms over time, by counting the infectum forms of each
verb in an author’s work, by taking into account prosody in poetry, etc.). However, such an approach
would still not guarantee entirely accurate results, even for one such author, and was not considered
efficient with respect to the INGRESSIVE construction as a whole for the current study.
26 Aerts

the likelihood of finding INGRESSIVE meanings and (a) high-register literary, often
archaizing, and possibly metrical texts and (b) texts where some Greek original
Table :Distribution of queried lexemes and their forms in our dataset (N=,).
Lexemea(% = share of dataset) Mood or non-finite form
(%: share of lexeme)
Tense (%: share of mood or
non-finite form)
teneo (n=,,or.%) Indicative (.%) Perfect (.%)
Perfect (shortened) (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Future perfect (.%)
Subjunctive (.%) Perfect (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Infinitive (.%) Perfect ( %)
Indicative/subjunctive (.%) Future perfect/perfect ( %)
timeo (n=,,or %) Indicative (.%) Perfect (.%)
Perfect (shortened) (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Future perfect (.%)
Subjunctive (%) Perfect (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Infinitive (.%) Perfect ( %)
Indicative/subjunctive (.%) Future perfect/perfect ( %)
sedeo (n=,,or.%)
taceo (n=,,or.%)
possideo (n=,or.%)
pateo-patesco (n=,or.%)
lateo (n=,or.%)
doleo (n=,or.%)
iaceo (n=,or.%)
haereo (n=,or.%)
dormio (n=,or.%)
pendeo (n=,or.%)
ardeo-ardesco (n=,or.%)
paueo-pasco (n=,or.%)
sileo-silesco (n=,or.%)
fulgeo-fulcio (n=,or.%)
tremo (n=,or.%)
caleo (n=,or.%)
cubo (n=,or.%)
Indicative (.%)
Perfect (.%)
Perfect (shortened) (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Future perfect (.%)
Subjunctive (.%) Perfect (.%)
Pluperfect (.%)
Infinitive (.%) Perfect ( %)
Indicative/subjunctive (.%) Future perfect/perfect ( %)
aIn order of appearance in Table , the base meanings of these lexemes are: teneo ‘to hold, to be in possession of’,timeo
‘to fear, to be afraid of’,sedeo ‘to sit, to be seated’,taceo ‘to be silent’,possideo ‘to possess’,pateo ‘to be open’–patesco ‘to
open, to be opened’,lateo ‘to hide, to be hidden’,doleo ‘to suffer, to be in pain’,iaceo ‘to lie, to be reclined’,haereo ‘to stick,
to be stuck to’,dormio ‘to sleep, to be asleep’,pendeo ‘to hang, to be hanging’,ardeo ‘to burn, to be on fire’–ardesco ‘to
catch on fire’,paueo ‘to be afraid’–pasco ‘to graze, to feed’,sileo ‘to be silent’–silesco ‘to fall silent’,fulgeo ‘to shine, to be
shining’–fulcio ‘to support’,tremo ‘to tremble, to be shaking’,caleo ‘to be warm’,cubo ‘to lie, to be in a lying position’.
The Latin ingressive perfect 27

inspired an otherwise less productive (or ‘dormant’) use of the Latin perfectum stem
tenses could be referred to as ‘language-external’influences, i.e. influences either on
the productivity of a construction or on the likelihood of attesting the construction
that are external to the Latin language itself, e.g. language contact and contextual
features such as genre or register. On the other hand, language-internal influences
constitute those processes within the Latin language system (e.g. in the subsystems of
prosody or word formation) that trigger a change in the expression of INGRESSIVITY,or
the productivity of such a form, in the subsystem of the verb tenses.
7
These ‘language-external’and ‘language-internal’influences on language
change have been proposed by Croft (2006) in his evolutionary theory of
language. Bentein (2012) applied Croft’s principles to the development of HAVE-and
BE-periphrases in the history of Ancient Greek, in combination with Mufwene’s
(2001) concept of language systems as ecosystems, in the sense that a language
resembles a self-regulating ecosystem in its ability to deal with certain ‘threats’to
the ‘equilibrium’of the system by compensating instabilities on the basis of ‘what
works’in other languages or in other subsystems of the language.
8
Figure 1 aims to
illustrate these theoretical foundations of ‘language ecology’: at any moment,
a (sub)system is considered ‘in balance’when native speakers using the (sub)
system (e.g. the tense system) are able to communicate effectively with other
Equilibrium
Disturbance
‒Funconal gap
‒Phonological/
prosodic conflicts
‒Morphological
confusion
Reacons
‒Language-external
‒Language-internal
Spread
Figure 1: The ecology of language systems.
7The terms ‘system’and ‘subsystem’are meant here as conceptual rather than specific, fully
described networks of choices. While such detailed networks might be conceivable, our current focus
is simply conceptual and on the interactions between systems and their internal dynamics.
8For Latin, cf. also Calboli’s (1997) inspirational work on changes in the system of determiners that
are related to changes in, and interactions between, various subsystems of the Latin language.
28 Aerts

speakers of the language, with minimal risk of failed communication. Such an
‘equilibrium’mightbedisturbed,e.g.whenacertainfunctionisnotfelttobe
represented by any form (e.g. the lack of a RESULTATIVE in the active, leading to the
innovation deletum habeo), or when changes in the phonetic system have
rendered two forms identical (e.g. FUT.IND.cantabit vs. PF.IND.cantavit, thought to
have triggered alternative constructions for the future).
9
As native speakers
creatively though largely unconsciously aimed to fill these gaps, more successful
attempts were based on some analogy with ‘what worked’elsewhere, either in
other languages (e.g. deletum habeo for the active RESULTATIVE is sometimes said to
have been inspired by the Greek HAVE periphrasis; see Bentein (2016: 175–179) for a
critical appraisal) or in other subsystems of the language (e.g. reinforcing the
ANTERIORITY meaning of the passive perfectum stem tenses [e.g. cantatus est], when
the past participle was felt to lose that meaning, by using the perfectum form of the
auxiliary [e.g. cantatus fuit]).
10
Themoresubstantiatedaninnovation,themore
profound its spread and ultimately its entrenchment in the newly balanced
(sub)system as a full member among its form-function pairings.
4 Discussion of data results
Before we go over the tendencies suggested by our data with regard to the correlation
between INGRESSIVE meanings of perfectum stem tenses and the co(n)textual factors
that could shed some light on the circumstances related to its diachrony, it
appears necessary to illustrate the annotation process of the meaning INGRESSIVE in our
close-reading analysis. Consider (6), from Martianus Capella’s 5th-century allegorical
didactic treatise on the seven liberal arts, where tenuerunt conveys the precepts that
are (not: were) included in Dialectic.
(6) (MART.CAP. 5, 475; trans. Stahl et al. 1977)
cui loco tractando subsidio est Dialectica, quam nuper audistis, per quam
cognitum puto, quid sit genus, quid species vel differentia, proprium, accidens
ceteraque, quae eius praecepta tenuerunt.
‘Dialectic, whom we have just heard, is of assistance in handling this source of
argument; from her I believe we know what genus, species, difference,
property, accident, and the rest are, which are included in her precepts.’
9Cf. Adams (2013: 653).
10 See Aerts (forthcoming).
The Latin ingressive perfect 29

In fact, instead of the PF.IND.tenuerunt, the present form tenent would have been
perfectly in line with the author’s intention to describe a present state. The option of
tenuerunt reflects the traditionally double nature of the PF.IND. as both a past,
narrative, ‘aoristic’tense and a tense that conveys anteriority or ‘current relevance’.
Given the non-narrative discourse type in (6), tenuerunt is not an example of a past
ingressive (as in [3] and [4]) but rather a ‘present anterior ingressive’: the current
relevance of the ‘entering into a state’(e.g. praecepta tenuerunt ‘they have made up
her precepts’) is, in fact, semantically more or less identical to the state itself
(e.g. praecepta tenent ‘they make up her precepts’). A similar interpretation was
made for tacuit in (7), an excerpt from Boethius’discussion (ca. 600 CE) of Cicero’sIn
topica, where the combination of the PF.IND. with nunc ‘now’explicitly profiles the
current relevance of ‘becoming silent’, i.e. that Cicero is silent on these ‘causes’here
even though he comments on them in a preceding section.
11
(7) (BOETH. in top. Cic. 5 p. 369, 27; trans. Stump 2004)
Necessariarum vero causarum conclusio non solet conturbare; ut enim causa
fuerit dicta, statim in conclusione sequuntur effectus. Non necessariarum vero,
quae sunt partim efficientes (quod nunc tacuit, sed paullo ante praedixit) non
habent subsequentem effectae rei conclusionem.
‘Those causes that are not necessary and that are efficient to some extent do
not have a subsequent conclusion concerning the thing affected. (Cicero says
nothing about these causes here, but he discussed them a little before.)’
In (8), a passage from the Codex Iustinianus, compiled in the 6th century, a law is
described whereby in a matter of dividing property or goods, the parties are bound to
the decision of a referee even in such cases where the referee was empowered by
someone who had no right to do so. As illustrated by the PF.SUBJ.dederint ‘have given
(their consent)’, which follows the regular rules of the consecutio temporum,possedit
and nactus est both represent a present state. Interestingly, the aspectual functions
leading to these present stative situations seem to involve two different, residual
meanings of the Latin perfectum stem tenses, inherited from the merger of the aorist
and perfect stems: with the state possideo ‘to have in possession’, the INGRESSIVE
function of the PF.IND. leads to the interpretation of the present state ‘he possesses’
as the current relevance of a present anterior ingressive; with the telic event ‘to
obtain’, the present state ‘holds’constitutes the RESULTATIVE state that follows from the
previously completed action of obtaining.
11 The presentation of Cicero’s behaviour more than 600 years before as ‘present’corresponds, of
course, to the so-called ‘literary’use of the present, where the text that is being cited from or
commented on, is regarded as communicating with the commentator (cf. Pinkster 2015: 397).
30 Aerts

(8) (COD.IUST. 3, 38, 2; posted 229 CE; trans. Frier et al. 2016)
Etiamsi is divisioni arbitrum dedit, cui ius dandi non fuit, tamen si socii
quondam divisioni consensum dederint, quod quisque eorum secundum
placita possedit, pro parte socii dominium nactus est.
‘Although the judge arbitrator in the division was appointed by a person who had
no right to do so, nevertheless if the owners in common have once consented to
the division, each will hold [holds] as his own that part of the common property
which he possesses according to the decision of the judge arbitrator.’
In fact, these ‘present anterior ingressives’constitute about one-third of all attested
ingressives in our representative sample. Apart from the PF.IND., however, anterior
ingressives also occur in the FUT.PF.IND. and in the PLUP.IND., as future (e.g. iacuerit in [9]
and doluerit in [10]) and past anterior ingressives (e.g. haeserat in [11]), respectively; as
it would appear from tenuit in (12), the PF.IND. is capable of replacing the PLUP.IND.(‘pro
plusquamperfecto’) also in this particular function of ‘past anterior ingressive’.
(9) (AUG. spec. 1, p. 7, 5; VULG. exod. 21:18; trans. English Standard Version,
henceforth ‘ESV’)
Si rixati fuerint uiri et percusserit alter proximum suum lapide uel pugno et ille
mortuus non fuerit, sed iacuerit in lectulo, si surrexerit et ambulauerit foris
super baculum suum, innocens erit qui percussit, ita tamen ut operas eius et
inpensas in medicos restituat.
‘When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and
the man does not die but takes to his bed, then if the man rises again and
walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear; only he shall
pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him thoroughly healed.’
(10) (CHIRON 416; trans. mine)
Si quod iumentum iocur doluerit, signa habebit talia.
‘If a mule will have contracted liver illness, he will display the following
symptoms.’
(11) (AUG. serm. 252, 5; trans. Rotelle 1993)
Aliquando enim uenti qui tollunt paleam de area, iterum flant a sepe ubi
haeserat palea, et eam reuocant in aream.
‘Sometimes, you see, the winds which blow chaffoffthe threshing floor,
blow again from the direction of the hedge where the chaffhad stuck, and
whisk it back to the threshing floor.’
(12) (DICT. 5, 13; trans. Frazer 1966)
Igitur ubi satias Troiani sanguinis tenuit et urbs incendiis complanata est,
initium solvendae per praedam militiae capiunt, primo a feminis captivis
pueris que adhuc imbellibus.
The Latin ingressive perfect 31

‘When we were sated with Trojan blood [When satiety of Trojan blood had
taken hold], and the city was burned to the ground, we divided the booty, in
payment of our military service, beginning with the captive women and
children.’
In all of these attestations of anterior INGRESSIVITY, the corresponding infectum form
could have just as easily been used to signal their current relevance: the future
situations of the man lying in bed in (9) and of the mule having pain in the liver in
(10), and the past situations of the chaffbeing stuck in the hedge in (11) and of the men
being sated with Trojan blood in (12). Altogether, these ‘anterior ingressives’
constitute 60 % of the ingressives attested in our dataset (i.e. 44 out of 73; n= 227).
Most of the other ingressives in our dataset involve the label ‘past ingressive’,
i.e. those predicates that properly refer to the past (e.g. in narrative discourse, as in
[3] and [4]) without any focus on ‘current relevance’. An interesting example in (13)
stems from a Christian treatise presumably from the 4th century, where in the
narrative of the nativity scene timuerunt is interpreted to convey the moment when
the shepherds became afraid (i.e. as a past ingressive), rather than an overview of the
situation of them being afraid (i.e. as a complexive perfect).
12
(13) (PS.MAR.VICTORIN. phys. 21; trans. ESV)
Pastores autem erant in regione illa pernoctantes et custodientes nocturnas
vigilias super greges suos. Angelus autem Domini stetit, et claritas circumfulsit
illos, et timuerunt timore magno: et dixit illis angelus, ne timueritis.
‘And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch
over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the
glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.
And the angel said to them “Fear not.”’
Apart from the ESV translation, support for this interpretation of timuerunt is also
provided by related texts in Latin and in Greek. In the Vulgate (14), the wording in
Hieronymus’translation from Greek is very similar to the version in (13). Interestingly,
the Greek New Testament (15) has the AOR.IND., with its attested potential of indicating
INGRESSIVITY. Finally, note also that the Vetus Latina has timuerunt invariably.
13
12 On the complexive perfect and its aspectual foundations, see Aerts (2021a: 55–56, 2021b: 180–181)
and references therein.
13 Consulted at https://apps.brepolis.net/vld/ (last accessed 23 May 2023); when accompanied by ‘a
great fear’,timuerunt was consistently expressed in the Vetus Latina database by timore magno, with
only one exception (timorem magnum).
32 Aerts

(14) (VULG. Luc. 2:8–10a)
et pastores erant in regione eadem vigilantes et custodientes vigilias noctis
supra gregem suum, et ecce angelus Domini stetit iuxta illos et claritas Dei
circumfulsit illos, et timuerunt timore magno, et dixit illis angelus “nolite
timere”.
(15) καὶἄγγελος Κυρίου ἐπέστη αὐτοῖςκαὶδόξα Κυρίου περιέλαμψεν αὐτούς,καὶ
ἐφοβήθησαν φόβον μέγαν.
These ‘past ingressive events’constitute 38 % of ingressives attested in our
representative sample (i.e. 28 out of 73; n= 227). In (16), from the Cento de Ecclesia, of
which the anonymous author is thought to have lived in the 5th century, another
attestation of a past ingressive (pependit)reflects again the potential of the PF.IND.to
convey INGRESSIVITY already in Vergil’s time. The momentaneous, eventive reading of
pependit in (17) as ‘the bees attached themselves on the bough’(lit. ‘they started to
hang’), rather than a global view on the situation of them hanging there (cf. note 12),
is rendered explicit by Vergil’s use of subitum ‘sudden’.
(16) (CENTO de eccl. 113–116; trans. mine)
nam memini |- neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum -:
formonsum pastor |Phoebum superare canendo
dum cupit |et cantu uocat in certamina diuos, 115
membra deo uictus |ramo frondente pependit.
‘For I remember –nor was I ignorant of the dangers before –that a
beautiful shepherd [Marsyas], when he wished to surpass Apollo in
singing and challenged the god to a singing contest, (was) hung from a
leafy bough after the god had conquered his limbs.’
(17) (VERG. Aen. 64–70; trans. Loeb)
huius apes summum densae (mirabile dictu)
stridore ingenti liquidum trans aethera vectae 65
obsedere apicem, et pedibus per mutua nexis
examen subitum ramo frondente pependit.
continuo vates “externum cernimus”inquit
“adventare virum et partis petere agmen easdem
partibus ex isdem et summa dominarier arce.”70
‘In the top of this tree, wondrous to tell, settled a dense swarm of bees,
borne with loud humming across the liquid air, and with feet
intertwined hung in sudden swarm from the leafy bough. At once the
prophet cries: “I see a stranger draw near; from the selfsame quarter a
troop seeks the same quarter, and reigns in the topmost citadel!”’
The Latin ingressive perfect 33

4.1 Language-external influences on the occurrence rate of
INGRESSIVITY
In Table 3, the results of our close-reading analysis of a representative sample of 227
data points selected evenly from five separate time periods and five text types
(depending on availability) are presented in a distribution over these time periods
and text types.
14
By necessity, some cohorts are less well represented: from the
earliest period, texts other than Plautus’and Terence’s comedies are rare or
fragmentary; Christian texts in Latin occurred exclusively after around 200 CE; and
apparently, texts that reflect the everyday language of their time more closely than
other texts (e.g. comedies, personal letters not meant for publication, epigraphic
texts such as curse tablets or wooden tablets not meant to last beyond the immediate
communicative context) hardly contain any instances of the target observations
(i.e. perfectum tense forms of the 19 selected stative verbs), with the exception of
Plautus’and Terence’s comedies from the Early Latin period.
15
From this table, and in
line with our hypotheses regarding the dynamics of the diachrony of the INGRESSIVE
function of the perfectum stem tenses, first as a residual archaism and later with
renewed productivity under the influence of Greek, it would appear that both poetic
texts and Christian texts display more attestations of INGRESSIVITY with the target
observations than literary prose texts (both about 40 %, vs. 16 %). Note, on the other
hand, the low occurrence rate of INGRESSIVITY in the early, though colloquial, comedies
of Plautus and Terence. From the 3rd century onwards, also technical texts display
more INGRESSIVES with the target observations than before (50 %); simultaneously, the
INGRESSIVE meaning reaches also a stable occurrence rate across text types of about
38 %, i.e. as (part of) the function of over one-third of our target observations.
As a possible counterargument against relating the correlation with poetic texts
to archaic language use, one could claim that the perfect tense was chosen only metri
causa, i.e. to obtain the desired number of syllables for the verse metre. However, as
illustrated by the example in (18), from Manilius’1st-century astronomical treatise in
verse, the competition is with the present tense rather than with other past tenses: as
discussed above, a ‘(present) anterior ingressive event’like iacuerunt ‘they have lain
14 Whereas our full representative sample totals 227 data points, the tables might include a slightly
different total (‘n’), depending on the possibility that for a small number of data points, an accurate
annotation of key variables presented in these tables was not possible (i.e. data points with ‘na’or ‘no
answer’for these variables). For example, four data points could notbe annotated accurately for time
period, text type and/or semantic function and were thus left out of the data presented in Table 3.
15 Note that poetic texts comprise all texts in verse (not including Bible ‘verses’), including poems by
Christian authors or on Christian topics; likewise, literary texts include hagiographic texts, since
generally their language was considered more narrative than in other Christian texts, which focus on
spreading Christian lore and concepts.
34 Aerts

Table :Distribution of attested functions of perfectum stem tense forms of selected stative verbs over time and text type (N=).
BCE – BCE –CE  CE – CE – CE – Total (text type)
Colloquial  –––– 
Anterior .%––––.%
Past .%––––.%
Ingressive .%–––– .%
Christian ––  
Anterior –––.%.%.%
Past ––– %.%.%
Ingressive –– %.%.%.%
Literary      
Anterior –.%.%.%.%.%
Past  %.%.%.%.%.%
Ingressive –.%–.%.%.%
Poetic      
Anterior .%.%.%.%.%.%
Past .%.%.%.%.%.%
Ingressive –.%.%.%.%.%
Technical      
Anterior .%.%.%.%.%.%
Past –.%.%.%.%.%
Ingressive .%–.%.%.%.%
Total (period) 
INGR: .%

INGR:  %

INGR: .%

INGR:  %

INGR: .%

INGR: .%
The Latin ingressive perfect 35

down’is semantically quite similar (if not identical) to the (present) situation ‘they
lie dead’, expressed in a less marked fashion by iacent. Note that the status of the
cum-clause with iacuerunt as a background situation (more specifically, a circum-
stantial situation; cf. Aerts 2021b: 179), is made explicit by the (underlined) narration
of the events that happen against that background in the subsequent clauses.
(18) (MANIL. 5, 664–669; trans. Loeb)
nec cepisse sat est: luctantur corpora nodis
exceptantque novas acies ferroque necantur, 665
inficiturque suo permixtus sanguine pontus.
tum quoque, cum toto iacuerunt litore praedae,
altera fit caedis caedes: scinduntur in artus,
corpore et ex uno varius discribitur usus.
‘And their capture is not the end: the fish struggle against their bonds,
meet a new assault, and suffer death by the knife; and the sea is dyed,
mixed with blood of its own. Furthermore, when the victims lie dead
along the shore, a second slaughter is perpetrated on the first; the fish
are torn into pieces, and a single body is divided to serve separate ends.’
As such, while thePF.IND. can certainly be considered a marked tense choice to express a
present situation like iacuerunt ‘they lie dead’in (18), and while many such choices for
ingressive perfects over unmarked present tense forms could indeed be considered to
be related to metrical considerations, the competition at stake is not between two past
tense forms such as the PF.IND.andIMPF.IND., which share a much larger segment of their
semantic potential and for which the choice depends on much more subtle textual and
interpersonal motivations.
16
The fact of the matter remains that, for perfectum stem
forms such as iacuerunt in (18) to be grammatical as a form to convey a present
situation, INGRESSIVITY must have been considered part of their semantic potential.
In a similar way, one could argue that many of the attestations in texts
influenced by Greek and its aorist tense could be accounted for by translators’more
or less consistent choices to translate the INGRESSIVE function of the Greek aorist with
the Latin tense that is usually also selected to represent the other, more frequent uses
of the aorist, i.e. the PF.IND. Again, however, it seems implausible that a proficient
native speaker like Augustinus or Hieronymus would use the PF.IND. for INGRESSIVITY if it
struck them as ungrammatical within the Latin tense system.
17
16 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. The way in which translators dealt with INGRESSIVITY could be regarded as a
‘literary Graecism’, as described by Calboli (2009), i.e. the introduction by a Latin author of a Greek
syntactic structure “that did not offend the Latin language but rather could be adapted to it”
(Calboli 2009: 70). For the related notion of ‘syntactic Graecism’, see Cuzzolin (2014: 251): “una
36 Aerts

In (19), a passage in Greek from Eusebius’4th-century Historia ecclesiastica
is accompanied by two translations into Latin, by Anastasius the Librarian (9th
century) and by Rufinus (5th century), respectively. The Greek original features
three instances of the perfect form κεκοίμηται: originally, the default meaning of
the perfect would have led to the interpretation ‘(s)he sleeps’,i.e.thestatethat
results from a previously completed action of a person lying down to sleep.
However, by the 4th century, the semantic potential of the Greek perfect is much
more diverse, complex and possibly ambiguous: as concluded by Crellin (2020:
475), even though his data reveal different trends depending on register, ANTERIORITY
and therefore some degree of convergence with the aorist seem to have become
part of its semantics (i.e. ‘[s]he has died’). Interestingly, Anastasius’consistent
choice for the PR.IND.dormiunt and dormit reflects his interpretation of the Greek
perfect κεκοίμηται as a present stative situation, i.e. ‘they sleep’.Notealso,
assuggestedbyhischoiceforquiescit, that he understands the Greek present
ἀναπαύεται as ‘she rests’. As such, Anastasius’versio is more a description of
where Philip, his daughters and John are buried. Rufinus’versio,ontheother
hand, reflects more closely the later meaning –especially on a textual level –of the
Greek perfect as an ANTERIOR event (i.e. ‘he has lain down’): not only does he opt for
the PF.IND.twice(dormierunt, dormivit), he also elects to narrate or report as events
theageing(consenuere ‘they grew old’)ofPhilip’s virgin daughters and the fact
that another daughter of his remained (remansit) in Ephesus until her death, thus
diverging from the versions of Eusebius and especially Anastasius by conveying
the information of where their graves can be found by profiling the current
relevance of anterior events (i.e. ‘they died/grew old/stayed there’) rather than
present situations (i.e. ‘they sleep there’) themselves. Importantly, for that to work
with dormio ‘to sleep’,thePF.IND.hastocombineANTERIORITY with INGRESSIVITY,
i.e. ‘they (have) started to sleep’and hence, in context, ‘they (have) died’. Still,
however, for the location of John’sgravehedoes select the PR.IND.dormit:given
Eusebius’consistent use of κεκοίμηται, and given the contents of the passage, it
seems more likely that Rufinus considered dormivit and dormit to ultimately
conveythesamebasicmeaning(i.e.present situations) rather than that he wanted
to distinguish the third instance of dormio from the first two.
18
costruzione sintattica che può essere motivata solo come copia di una equivalente costruzione
presente in greco e che al contempo non può essere spiegata come sviluppo, parallelo ma indi-
pendente, interno alla storia del latino”.
18 It seems plausible that the PR.IND.dormit was chosen for pragmatical reasons, at the end of the
passage, to mark a switchin discoursemodes from narrating or reporting (ANTERIOR +INGRESSIVE= currently
relevant state) to describing (present state); on discourse modes, see e.g. Smith (2003).
The Latin ingressive perfect 37

(19) Greek (Eusebius, 4th c.) Anastasius (9th c.) Rufinus (5th c.)
καὶγὰρ κατὰτὴν
Ἀσίαν μεγάλα στοιχεῖα
κεκοίμηται·ἅτινα
ἀναστήσεται τῇἐσχάτῃ
ἡμέρᾳτῆς παρουσίας
τοῦκυρίου,ἐνᾗ
ἔρχεται μετὰδόξης ἐξ
οὐρανοῦκαὶ
ἀναζητήσει πάντας
τοὺςἁγίους,Φίλιππον
τῶνδώδεκα
ἀποστόλων,ὃς
κεκοίμηται ἐν
Ἱεραπόλει καὶδύο
θυγατέρες αὐτοῦ
γεγηρακυῖαι παρθένοι
καὶἡἑτέρα αὐτοῦ
θυγάτηρ ἐνἁγίῳ
πνεύματι
πολιτευσαμένη ἐν
Ἐφέσῳἀναπαύεται· ἔτι
δὲκαὶἸωάννης,ὁἐπὶτὸ
στῆθος τοῦκυρίου
ἀναπεσὼν,ὃςἐγενήθη
ἱερεὺςτὸπέταλον
πεφορεκὼςκαὶμάρτυς
καὶδιδάσκαλος,οὗτος
ἐνἘφέσῳκεκοίμηται.
Etenim per asia magna
elimenta dormiunt
quae resurgent
novissima die adventus
domini in qua inveniet
cum gloria ex celo et
revivificabit omnes
sanctos philippum qui
est duodecimus
apostolorum qui
dormit in ierapoli et
due filie eius
honorabiles virgines
et altera eius filia in
sancto spiritu
conversata in epheso
quiescit. Adhuc autem
iohannes ipse super
pectus domini
recumbens qui factus
est sacerdos petalum
ferens et martyr et
magister ipse in epheso
dormit.
Quod magna lumina in
Asiae partibus
dormierunt, quae
resuscitabit dominus in
novissimo die adventus
sui, cum veniet in gloria
et requiret omnes
sanctos suos, dico
autem de Filippo
<inquit>, qui fuit unus
ex apostolis, qui
dormivit apud
Hierapolin. Sed et duae
filiae eius inibi virgines
consenuere, et alia eius
filia spiritu sancto
repleta permansit apud
Ephesum. Et Iohannes
ille, qui supra pectus
domini recumbebat, qui
fuit sacerdos dei
pontificale petalum
gestans et martyr et
doctor optimus apud
Ephesum dormit.
Historia ecclesiastica lib. 3, cap. 31, par. 3 (from Forrai 2008: 140 [note 441])
‘For in Asia also great lights have fallen asleep, which shall rise again on the
last day, at the coming of the Lord, when he shall come with glory from
heaven and shall seek out all the saints. Among these are Philip, one of the
twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis, and his two aged virgin
daughters, and another daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests
at Ephesus; and moreover John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who
reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and being a priest wore the sacerdotal
plate. He also sleeps at Ephesus.’(trans. McGiffert 1890, of Eusebius’text)
38 Aerts

Likewise, the INGRESSIVE function of the Greek aorist is met with various ‘forms’in
Latin, suggesting again that the language system provides for its expression in ways
that allow for more subtle nuances depending on the translator’s interpretation of
the original. In the 7th-century Glosses on the Psalms, the anonymous author
narrates the earthquake following the death of Christ on the cross by means of the
PF.IND.oftremo ‘to tremble’.
19
A non-ingressive reading of the perfect tense in a
narrative passage such as this one would entail that the earthquake or ‘trembling
of the earth’was over when the stars were concealed and the rocks were split
(complexive perfect, cf. note 12), but such a reading appears rather counterintuitive.
Still, a more common way to refer to earthquakes in Latin is the translation opted for
in the corresponding passage in the Vulgate (Mt 27:51), i.e. terra mota est ‘the earth
was moved’, which features an unmarked (narrative) use of the PF.IND. of a telic event
(moveo). The original aorist form ἐσείσθη in the New Testament, however, which
should be interpreted as ‘started to tremble’, corresponds more closely to tremuit.
Given these two versions in Latin translations, a look at the Vetus Latina database
might reveal more about their history: there are many examples of terra mota est
(also terra commota est,terre motus factus est, terra movebatur), but also attestations
of terra tremuit as well as terra contremuit (e.g. AMBR. inst. virg. 7, 46, 5; AMBR.fid. 5, 14,
34; cf. ARNOB. nat. 1, 53), terra intremuit (e.g. ALC.AVIT. Carm. 6, 236), and terram tremere
facit (AMBR.fid. 5, 54 apud Ioh. Maxent. Conc.SIV 2 48), terram tremuisse (PS.AVG.
quaest. test. 94, 3). As such, the option of a (grammatical) INGRESSIVE tremuit to refer
to the earthquake is made explicit by its coexistence with lexical alternatives
(with affixed corradicals) for the same content, which also illustrates that the reading
of the Greek original as an event (i.e. the initiation of the trembling) rather than a
globally viewed situation (cf. note 12) was a common one.
20
In particular, in an
excerpt from Pseudo-Augustine (PS.AVG. serm. ed. Caillau 1, 26, 7), the version where
the other portents occur ‘during the earthquake’, i.e. after the earth had started
trembling, is rendered even more clearly by the use of in terraemotu.
21
(20) (ANON. in psalm. 16, 11; trans. compiled from ESV)
OCULOS SUOS STATUERUNT DECLINARE IN TERRAM. Quando Christus passus est, omnis
terra tremuit et sidera obscurata sunt et petrae scissae sunt.
‘THEY SET THEIR EYES TO CAST US TO THE GROUND. When Christ died, the whole earth
shook, and the stars were concealed and the rocks were split.’
19 As it turned out to occur in a text beyond the diachronic scope of this paper, tremuit in (20) was not
included in the data reported in Tables 3 and 4. Still, it was included in our discussion of examples
because of its interaction with several relevant sources.
20 Cf. also the Armenian translation discussed in Crellin and Jügel (2020: 363–364).
21 Similar examples include ecce terremotus factus est magnus; nam velum templi scissum est, et
omnis terra tremuit and tremente terra concussu (Antiphonale Missae Beneventanum 127 and 136).
The Latin ingressive perfect 39

Cf. Vulgata Mt 27:51: Et ecce velum templi scissum est in duas partes a summo
usque deorsum et terra mota est et petrae scissae sunt.
Cf. Greek NT: Καὶἰδοὺτὸκαταπέτασμα τοῦναοῦἐσχίσθη ἀπ’ἄνωθεν ἕως
κάτω εἰς δύο,καὶἡγῆἐσείσθη,καὶαἱπέτραι ἐσχίσθησαν.
Cf. Vetus Latina database: very often ‘terra (com)mota est’,or‘terra tremuit’
and even ‘terra contremuit’and ‘terra intremuit’; cf. especially e.g. Ps-Aug.:
“in terraemotu crucis Petrae scissae sunt et monumenta patefacta sunt et
multa corpora sanctorum dormientium resurrexerunt.”
From our discussions of (19) and (20), we can deduce not only that the INGRESSIVE
function of the PF.IND. was already part of the native Latin tense system, but also that
it interacted with similar form-function pairings in the language system to the point
that the choice for a certain form resulted in more subtle, pragmatic differences
(related to e.g. discourse mode, sequentiality and textual status among foregrounded
events).
22
As such, it would appear that native speakers of Latin were able to make
use of the subtleties present in their own language system when dealing with Greek
tenses, and that these form-function pairings were not simply ‘calqued’into Latin.
However, given the immensity of Christian literature in Latin from the 3rd century
onwards, where much of the language is based on a Greek original where INGRESSIVITY
was likely still more productive, an increase of attestations of the INGRESSIVE meaning
of perfectum stem tense forms should not be surprising.
23
More interesting still is
the subsequently increasing occurrence rate, suggested by the data in Table 3, of
ingressives with perfectum stem tenses in other text types as well, particularly in
technical texts. In that sense, whereas the INGRESSIVE function might not have been
inspired by translations of the Greek aorist encountered in Christian literature, it
might have been rekindled simply because it was used (or found ‘useful’) more often
than during the preceding centuries.
4.2 Language-internal influences on the occurrence rate of
INGRESSIVITY
To account for the ‘dormant’phase of Latin INGRESSIVITY, we now turn to language-
internal influences on its diachrony. One of these influences stems from the lexicon
and its internal dynamics. Table 4 presents the attestation rate of INGRESSIVITY for the
various lexemes that were included in our corpus queries. Naturally, only the 227
22 See note 16 for further references.
23 For NT Greek, see Fanning (1990: 137), including references to NT grammars in his note 28. Cf. also
Moser (2017: 154) for the persistence of INGRESSIVITY even into Modern Greek.
40 Aerts

data points selected for the representative sample in our qualitative phase are
included. As can be observed in the table, there are vast differences between our
lexemes: for sedeo ‘to be seated’and haereo ‘to be stuck’, the rate of INGRESSIVITY is
around 85 %; others, like dormio occurred with INGRESSIVITY half of the time (but notice
the low number of data points in our sample) or 40 % of the time (iaceo ‘to be in a
lying position’), but most verbs are used with INGRESSIVE meaning less than 30 % of the
time. Recall, at this point, that contrary to Haverling (2003, 2013, 2018), we did not
focus our corpus queries on stative verbs that coexist with an affixed corradical verb
for the expression of INGRESSIVITY in a lexical way. Moreover, from our verbs that do
have such corradicals, pateo,ardeo and sileo were disregarded in our further ana-
lyses as their perfectum stem forms (e.g. patuit, arduit, siluit) are identical to those of
their corradicals (patesco, ardesco, silesco).
However, as it turns out, for the most common lexemes in the corpora
(cf. Table 2), there is a striking difference in occurrence rate of INGRESSIVITY
between those that coexist with such a corradical (especially taceo [5.6 %],for which
conticesco is the lexical alternative) and those that do not (especially sedeo [86.4 %]
and haereo [83.3 %]).
24
Moreover, for sedeo, as evidenced by its descendants in
Table :Occurrence rate of the INGRESSIVE function for stative verbs included
in our qualitative analysis (N=).
Lexeme # of INGRESSIVITY
sedeo  out of  (.%)
haereo  out of  (.%)
dormio out of ( %)
iaceo out of  ( %)
possideo out of  (.%)
doleo out of  (.%)
teneo  out of  (.%)
pendeo out of  (.%)
lateo out of  (.%)
timeo out of  (.%)
taceo out of  (.%)
caleo out of 
fulgeo out of 
cubo out of 
tremo out of 
24 Note that we only consider corradicals with affixes that add nothing else besides the meaning of
(lexical) INGRESSIVITY: for sedeo, there are corradicals such as insideo or resideo (not to be confused with
resido in [4]), which add additional meaning depending on the affix used; for haereo, there is a form
The Latin ingressive perfect 41

Romance, the INGRESSIVE meaning at some point became part of the core meaning of
the unaffixed verb itself: in Italian, sedere is used for both ‘to be seated’and ‘to sit
down’, although for the latter sedersi is often preferred; in French, the immediate
descendant seoir meant ‘to sit down’as well, although it is now defective and
replaced, through a derivational strategy similar to the one for its Italian sibling, by
s’asseoir.
25
Verbs with less impressive occurrence rates for INGRESSIVITY seem to confirm that
same connection with a later inclusion of the INGRESSIVE variant into the base meaning
of the lexeme.
26
First, the Romance descendants of iaceo ‘to lie, to be in a lying
position’, which occurred with INGRESSIVITY 40 % of the time in our sample, did not
incorporate the ingressive variant ‘to recline, to assume a lying position’in their base
meaning as widely as they did for sedeo (only to some extent in Ibero-Romance, e.g.
Portuguese jazer, Galician xacer, Spanish yacer). For possideo, doleo, pendeo or lateo,
to the best of my knowledge, none of the Romance descendants have included ‘to
obtain’,‘to get hurt’,‘to enter into a hanging position’or ‘to go into hiding’in their
base meanings.
27
For teneo, the verb with the most attestations in our corpora and an
occurrence rate of INGRESSIVITY of 28.6 % in our sample, only Italian tenere seems to
have included a meaning of ‘to take’next to ‘to have, to hold’. Likewise, Italian is the
only Romance language which clearly has both ‘to be silent’and ‘to stop talking’
included in the base meaning of their direct descendant of taceo. Interestingly,
affixed corradicals with a basic ingressive meaning existed in Latin for many such
verbs that are shown to have lower occurrence rates for (grammatical) INGRESSIVITY
(i.e. condolesco, latesco, conticesco).
28
Apart from the role played by Italian, we could therefore tentatively conclude
that (a) part of the attestations of INGRESSIVITY with verbs that feature this function in
the perfectum stem forms more often than other verbs (sedeo, and to some extent
haeresco mentioned by some dictionaries, of which apparently no perfectum stem forms have been
attested. However, for an alternative, apparently corradical interpretation (in our terminology) of
sedeo and sido (and hence consido, resido), cf. Haverling (2018: 241).
25 For haereo, a descendant from adhaereo in Old French is attested, while haeresco was quite rare.
One dictionary (Blaise Patr.) does mention s’attacher à as part of the meaning of haereo.
26 Dormio is not included in this conclusion,as there are not enough attestations in our randomly
selected representative sample to formulate any claims with certainty.
27 Unfortunately, a systematic consultation of all available dictionaries of the various Romance
languages and dialects was not feasible within the limits of the current study.
28 Exceptions are possideo, which is already derived from sedeo and for the ingressive variant of
which (‘to obtain’) other lexical options were available, and teneo, which does not have few attes-
tations of INGRESSIVITY (n= 14) but is simply used more often and in more diverse contexts and senses;
for pendeo ‘to be hanging’,finally, one could imagine that the competition from the causative variant
pendo ‘to cause to hang’prevented the need for a lexical ingressive.
42 Aerts

iaceo), could be related to their individual development towards including an
ingressive reading within the semantic potential of the lexeme, which most likely
started at some point early enough to account for the wide distribution of this lexical
potential among Romance descendant forms, and that (b) stative verbs for which
affixed corradicals were already thriving in Latin, were expressed in the perfectum
stem tense forms less often since the INGRESSIVE use with statives was likely perceived
as a much more marked (and possibly archaic) use than the ANTERIOR or PERFECTIVE PAST
use of their telic corradical counterparts.
Importantly, these data and results reveal the importance of including more
lexemes in corpus queries, based on the relation in the language system between
stative Aktionsart (i.e. ideally all stative verbs) and grammatical aspect
(i.e. perfectum stem forms), rather than searching for forms of individual pairs of
corradical verbs (i.e. stative and telic verbs such as tacuit and conticuit) and other
fairly isolated lexemes such as habeo (filium).
29
While Haverling’s (2003: 127–129,
2018: 251–253) conclusions about the changes in the actional system in Late Latin (e.g.
the conflation between tacuit and conticuit as having both stative and telic uses)
seem to be supported by the tenses they both are attested in (PF.IND. vs. IMPF.IND.), these
conclusions are problematic for two reasons. First, the discussion of examples of
tacui(t) that do not express INGRESSIVITY completely disregards the semantic potential
of the PF.IND. to convey a ‘complexive perfect’, as well attested in both Greek and
Latin; with this use of the perfect tense, no assumptions about any diffuse Aktionsart
or actionality of taceo is necessary.
30
Second, as these conclusions are based on
research on a (lexically) selective and rather restrictive number of target observa-
tions, they should not in themselves lead to conclusions about grammatical systems
such as the pairing of INGRESSIVITY with the perfect tense or the functions of aspect and
the perfect and imperfect tenses. At best, we can observe from some attestations that
the semantic potential of the lexeme conticesco is expanded to include the state of
being silent rather than just the event of becoming silent (e.g. Haverling 2013: 126).
Returning, in conclusion, to our insight based on Table 4 that direct Romance
descendants of Latin statives with a significantly higher occurrence rate of INGRESSIVITY
29 On tacuit versus conticuit, see again the work of Haverling (e.g. 2003: 118–129, 2018: 239); on habuit
filium in the INGRESSIVE sense of ‘he became a father’rather than ‘he had a son’, see Haverling (e.g. 2003:
126, 2018: 239–240); other frequently occurring corradical pairs in Haverling’s research on lexical
versus grammatical INGRESSIVITY (in our terminology) mainly involve verbs that are generally rather
rare in the extant literature. Also for taceo-conticesco, see Aerts’(2021b: 185) note on the virtually
complete absence of the lexeme taceo in the extant work of Livy: any study of the Latin language that
focusses on verbs like tacui as a means to investigate grammatical INGRESSIVITY (which could therefore
in principle occur with any stative verb), thus effectively ignores a substantial part of the Latin
corpus.
30 See e.g. Aerts (2021a: 56).
The Latin ingressive perfect 43

include both the stative and the ingressive variant in their base meaning (e.g.
sedeo > It. sedere, Fr. seoir (obsolete) and iaceo > Port. Jazer, Gal. xacer, Sp. yacer), we
can observe in Romance that these individual languages feature a lexical innovation
that specializes in the ingressive variant, in much the same way as Latin featured
innovations such as conticesco and latesco to complement taceo and lateo: in Italian,
sedersi is used exclusively as ‘to take a seat, to sit down’whereas sedere can be used
for both meanings (i.e. also ‘to be seated’); in French, however, seoir also had both
meanings, but asseoir was specialized in ‘to sit down’and most commonly used in the
reflexive version s’asseoir, of which a periphrasis être assis has been the default form
for ‘to be seated’since seoir became obsolete. Concerning iaceo, the semantics of Port.
jazer, Gal. xacer and Sp. yacer still include both the stative ‘to be lying down’and the
telic ‘to recline’, although the verb is generally perceived as archaic and usually
replaced by a reflexive version of a verb of another root for the ingressive reading
(Port. and Gal. deitarse, Sp. acostarse and tumbarse), of which, again, a periphrasis
conveys the corresponding state (Port. and Gal. estar deitado and Sp. estar acostado,
estar tumbado).
As such, it would seem that those Latin statives that had no corradical and were
specialized in the ingressive reading, (a) tended, to some extent, to naturally occur
more often with INGRESSIVITY in Latin, as there was no (corradical) alternative,
(b) subsumed the ingressive reading in their (lexical) base meaning because of that
extensive use with grammatical INGRESSIVITY, (c) came to be perceived as inefficient or
archaic, or otherwise highly specialized (e.g. here lies …on tombstones for Ibero-
Romance descendants of iaceo), possibly because of the resulting ambiguity, and
(d) were either supplemented by (d.1) a derived, specialized form (e.g. sedersi with
ingressive reading only) or (d.2) replaced by a different lexeme (e.g. deitarse or
tumbarse) for both readings altogether, often involving a reflexive clitic that renders
explicit the inherent reflexive meaning of e.g. ‘sitting down’or ‘lying down’, since
these alternative lexemes are transitives themselves (e.g. deitar ‘to lay someone
down’); the stative reading is then expressed (grammatically) by means of a
periphrasis of these lexemes, e.g. estar deitado or estar tumbado. All in all, such
developments are not entirely dissimilar to Haverling’s observations on the gradual
fading of actionality with lexical ingressives such as conticesco. In any case, they
strongly suggest a continuous exchange and mutual influencing between the Latin
systems of (perfectum) tenses and of actionality.
Another cluster of language-internal influences on the occurrence rate of
INGRESSIVITY is presented in Table 5. As illustrated in (21), and contrary to what many of
the examples presented above might have suggested, grammatical INGRESSIVITY is not
restricted to the indicative or even the PF.IND. tense: in fact, 43.8 % of attestations of
the PF.INF. of the targeted stative lexemes feature INGRESSIVITY as part of their meaning,
against 31.7 % of our attestations of the indicative and 29.6 % of attestations of the
44 Aerts

subjunctive. In the passage from Ovid’s 1st-century Epistulae (i.e. Heroides) below,
the infinitives iacuisse and tenuisse convey situations (‘to lie on the couch’,‘to hold a
girl’) that follow from the initiation of the same states; again, therefore, the present
infinitive would have constituted a less marked choice for more or less the same
meaning.
31
(21) (OV. epist. 3, 117–118; trans. Loeb)
tutius est iacuisse toro, tenuisse puellam,
Threiciam digitis increpuisse lyram
‘Safer is it to lie on the couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle
[be tinkling] with your fingers the Thracian lyre.’
One possible explanation for such a discrepancy between indicatives and, especially,
infinitives may be related to the occurrence rates of INGRESSIVITY in narrative and in
non-narrative discourse: while 41.7 % of our data points in narrative discourse
feature INGRESSIVITY, these almost exclusively concern indicative tenses (24 out of 25);
infinitives and subjunctives occurred far more often in non-narrative discourse (38
out of 43 infinitives and subjunctives), alongside many indicatives (121 out of 159 data
points in non-narrative discourse). As such, particularly prone to feature INGRESSIVITY
are, on the one hand, indicatives in narrative discourse (43.6 %) and, on the other,
subjunctive and infinitive forms occurring in non-narrative discourse (14 out of 38,
or 36.8 %). In narrative discourse, the possible reasons to use the PF.IND. with stative
situations are rather limited (apart from INGRESSIVITY, these are mainly the complexive
perfect and an external perspective; see Aerts 2021a: 55–62).
32
In non-narrative
discourse, more options with the indicative of states are available, especially
Table :Rate of INGRESSIVITY with (a) indicative, subjunctive or infinitive and (b) discourse modes (N=).
Mood/non-finite form Discourse mode # of INGRESSIVITY (N=)
Indicative:  (.%) Narrative:  (.%)  out of  (.%)
Non-narrative:  (.%)  out of  (.%)
Subjunctive:  (.%) Narrative: (.%) out of (.%)
Non-narrative:  (.%) out of  (. %)
Infinitive:  (.%) Narrative: (.%) –
Non-narrative:  (.%) out of  ( %)
31 Notice also the very similar meaning of increpuisse, even though increpo is not a state but an
activity (‘to make noise (on the lyre)’and as such corresponds to an INCHOATIVE in our terminology.
32 Note that 51 out of 55 (92.7 %) of indicative forms in narrative discourse in our sample were, in
fact, in the PF.IND.; four others occurred in the PLUP.IND. (7.3 %).
The Latin ingressive perfect 45

‘anterior situations’or ‘absolute past situations’(see Aerts 2021a: 59, 2021b: 178),
resulting in a lower occurrence rate of INGRESSIVITY with indicative tense forms than in
narrative discourse (24.8 % vs. 43.6 %). That diversity is more limited for infinitives
and subjunctives, which express relative tense and absolute-relative tense, respec-
tively, and therefore only ANTERIORITY in the case of perfectum stem forms.
33
The added
value of INGRESSIVITY, based on the perfectum stem’s aspectual inheritance from the
aorist, is often combined with that ANTERIORITY in these attestations.
34
One final interesting observation can be made with regard to the conspicuous
fronting of the analysed perfectum stem forms. One can imagine that, at a time when
a certain function of a certain form is perceived as a ‘marked’use of that form, that
special meaning could be highlighted by conspicuously fronting the predicate.
35
In
that sense, the data in Table 6 seem to support the hypothesis that INGRESSIVITY was
originally an archaic function of perfectum stem tenses that was revived in later
texts: in the earliest texts (BCE 240–90), all fronted target observations did not occur
with ingressive meaning and the only two attestations of ingressives (out of 24) did
not display predicate fronting, in line with the idea that INGRESSIVITY was a less marked
meaning then compared to later times, when ingressives occurred in fronted
position about 30 % of the time. However, due to the potential influence of metric
considerations on this correlation, Table 7 was added with the same information but
Table :INGRESSIVITY and verb fronting over time (N=).
BCE – BCE –CE  CE – CE – CE – Total
−
INGRESSIVE      
–VERB FRONTING .%.%.%.%.%.%
+VERB FRONTING .%.%.%.%.%.%
+
INGRESSIVE 
–VERB FRONTING .%.%.%.%.%.%
+VERB FRONTING –.%.%.%.%.%
Total (time period)      
33 For a theoretical distinction between absolute, relative and absolute-relative tense, see Comrie
(1985); for a critical application to Latin, see Aerts (2018).
34 Note that aspectual meanings such as INGRESSIVITY and RESULTATIVITY are to be set apart from the
distinction between perfectivity and imperfectivity, which is often considered to be relevant –if at
all –only for the indicative mood in narrative discourse (see Aerts 2021b: 177; Pinkster 1983: 277).
35 Cf. Spevak (2010: 46–47) on verum focus and references therein, especially to Marouzeau’s (1938:
50–54) observation that verb fronting is related to, among other phenomena, a certain “relief de la
fonction verbale”.
46 Aerts

with the exclusion of all data points from verse texts; an unfortunate result is, of
course, the decimation of data points especially from the Early period (i.e. the archaic
comedies).
Based on the data presented in Table 7, a number of observations can be made.
First, in the prose texts of our sample, our target observations never occurred in
fronted position before the 1st century CE; 3 out of 15 (i.e. 20 %) data points in these
two time periods nevertheless occurred with INGRESSIVE meaning, confirming our
previous observation that INGRESSIVITY might not have been perceived as a particularly
marked function of the perfectum stem tenses in Early and Classical Latin. In later
periods, when more data points survived the selection for our sample, INGRESSIVE
data points increasingly occurred with verb fronting, seemingly highlighting the
realization that INGRESSIVITY was a marked, perhaps unusual function of perfectum
stem tenses but nevertheless a potential one that came in handy in increasingly
intensive linguistic exchanges with Greek, especially in the translation of Christian
texts. However, observe also that verb fronting became more frequent, albeit to a
lesser extent, with non-ingressive meanings as well, that is to say, in general.
Obviously, these observations are to be regarded with caution: on the one hand, the
absolute frequencies in many of the cells in Tables 6 and 7 are very low and per-
centages could easily change in either direction with the addition of one or two extra
data points; on the other hand, as shown by our data on verb fronting in general
(i.e. without distinction between functions) and in line with observations made in the
literature on the diachrony of word order patterns in Latin in general, we cannot at
this point make any substantial claims about perceived markedness of the INGRESSIVE
function on the basis of verb fronting.
36
Table :INGRESSIVITY and verb fronting over time (verse texts excluded) (N=).
BCE – BCE –CE  CE – CE – CE – Total
–INGRESSIVE      
–VERB FRONTING .%.%.%.%.%.%
+VERB FRONTING ––.%.%.%.%
+INGRESSIVE 
–VERB FRONTING .%.%.%.%.%.%
+VERB FRONTING ––.%.%.%.%
Total (time period)      
36 See Luraghi (1995: 367), and references therein, on the diachrony of word order patterns in Latin.
The Latin ingressive perfect 47

5 Concluding remarks
Based on our data related to the diachrony of the INGRESSIVE function of the perfectum
stem tenses, which have been selected to represent the full diversity, in terms
of diachrony and text type, of the consulted corpora, a number of important
observations can be made. First, grammatical INGRESSIVITY has been confirmed to
occur especially in poetic and in Christian text types. Metrical considerations and
translators’choices might have played some role, but not to the extent that INGRESSIVITY
was ungrammatical: it was considered part of the tense system and the choice network
constituted by the form-function pairings within. Second, the dynamics of the diach-
rony of INGRESSIVITY in Latin as observed with different lexemes in our representative
sample are related to the dynamics in the system governing the creation of corradical
lexemes with a specialization in the ingressive variant of the same core meaning;
moreover, a similar dynamics can be observed in Romance languages, although
further, morespecialized research in the field of Romance linguistics is required at this
point. Third, the current paper and its research methodology have shown the
importance of substantiating, refining and complementing the claims put forward in
previous studies by including stative verbs that were not used alongside corradical
lexical ingressives, by searching for target observations as broadly and as systemati-
cally as possible, and by sharing and reporting on research data transparently. In that
regard, it should be noted again that the analysis of additional data points would lead
to more in-depth insights into the interactions involved and described above:
for example, the perceived markedness of INGRESSIVITY and its development over time
requires more data points especially for earlier texts, if at all possible, before we
can make any substantial claims. In addition, as indicatives and other forms of the
perfectum stem tenses can be expected to display different rates of INGRESSIVITY, this
factor would make an interesting second input variable for all other tables as well;
such multivariable analyses were not attempted in this phase of our research, as the
need for additional data points would multiply, for each additional factor included, in
order to preserve the quantitative foundations for any results. Ultimately, the
actual significance of such factors could only be ascertained with certainty through
statistical testing, which would require even more data points –an unfortunate
issue for studies relying primarily on qualitative data gathered from intensive
close-reading analyses.
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