The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from reliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

The first syntax-pragmatics interface for Latin, Pragmatics for Latin offers a detailed philological analysis of Latin information structure and shows how the grammatical and pragmatic meanings of Latin sentences can be computed quite naturally in a single formal semantic derivation.

Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this work aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general cross-categorical system of syntactic structure which translates into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning." "The book will be useful for advanced students and scholars in the fields of linguistics, Latin, and classics."--Jacket.

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from reliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

This study interprets ancient Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on cross-linguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data. It reconstructs the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing and intonation of Greek speech.

Combining the documentation of the 19th-century philological tradition with the insights and analytical tools of late 20th-century theoretical linguistics, this book develops a theory of Latin word order. It introduces the linguistic concepts, formalism and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order.

The interface between syntax and meaning, both semantic and pragmatic, has emerged as an area of linguistics theory. This study applies some of these ideas to hyperbaton, offering a new theory with broad applications for our understanding of Greek syntax.

A striking feature of Latin elegiac verse is its very free word order. One gets the impression that the word order is just random or that the rules of Latin syntax have been suspended for metrical convenience. Combining ample philological documentation with an overall theoretical stance, this book argues that these impressions are wrong and proceeds to analyze the syntax of Latin verse as a coherent system generated by the application of a small set of derivational rules. While these rules are independently available syntactic mechanisms like scrambling, stranding and verb raising, their systematically regular application both at the clausal and at the phrasal level is remarkable. Not only complete constituents but also partial constituents are constantly attracted towards the left edge of the phrase that contains them. The cumulative effect of this is to narrow the extent and attenuate the weight of the nuclear assertion, which reduces its processing domain and the span of its prosodic correlate. This book will be of interest both to Classicists and to linguists: it aims to solve an old problem in Classical philology, while at the same time working out a configurational syntax for a language with extreme free word order.