A Diachronic Study of Prepositional Phrases in Latin Noun Phrases

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One of the notable linguistic features of classical Latin, when compared with its Indo-European relatives, both ancient and modern, is its relatively infrequent and selective use of adnominal prepositional phrases; for example, phrases like, `a bird in the hand` are rarely found. Both traditional philological studies and linguistically oriented ones have shown that, in classical Latin, prepositional phrases may assume only a limited number of roles in the noun phrase (e.g. Theme, but not Agent, and only a restricted set of Goals). It is commonly said that adnominal prepositional phrases occur both more frequently and more freely in post-classical Latin, indicating that, as early as the first century CE, Latin's use of adnominal prepositional phrases began shifting toward that of its Romance offspring. Evidence for this shift is, however, rather anecdotal, and to date no controlled frequency studies have been undertaken, nor has the nature of the increased freedom, ever been precisely defined, although it is well known that in Medieval Latin, prepositional phrases representing Agents are well-attested. This study proposes to fill one of the gaps in our knowledge of the change from Latin to Romance, first by gathering a corpus of adnominal prepositional phrases from Latin prose texts ranging from the 2nd century BCE to the sixth century CE, then by measuring, recording, and analyzing their frequency of occurrence, and finally by analyzing the corpus to see what it can tell us about changes in the Latin noun phrase. The corpus itself will be stored both in ASCII format and in a relational database, both of which will be obtainable on the World Wide Web via FTP. The analysis will concentrate on the argument structure of noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, and especially on the expansion of the kinds of thematic roles (e.g., Agent, Experiencer, Goal) that prepositional phrases came to encode. The study will provide new and detailed evidence which will shed light on more generalized linguistic phenomena, such as the decay of the system of nominal inflection, involved in the change from Latin to Romance.