A Diachronic Study of Prepositional Phrases in Latin Noun Phrases

与古代和现代的印欧近亲相比，古典拉丁语有一个显著的语言特征，那就是它对介词短语的使用相对较少，而且是有选择性的；例如，很少有人使用这样的短语：‘一只鸟在手’。传统的语言学研究和语言学研究都表明，在古典拉丁语中，介词短语在名词短语中可能只承担有限的角色(例如，主位，而不是施事，并且只是一组有限的目标)。人们普遍认为，后古典拉丁语中的介词短语出现的频率更高、更自由，这表明早在公元1世纪，拉丁语中对介词短语的使用就开始向其浪漫史的后代转移。然而，这种转变的证据相当轶事，到目前为止还没有进行过受控频率研究，也没有准确定义增加的自由度的性质，尽管众所周知，在中世纪拉丁语中，代表代理人的介词短语得到了很好的证明。这项研究建议填补我们在从拉丁语到浪漫主义转变方面的知识空白之一，首先从公元前2世纪到公元前6世纪的拉丁文散文文本中收集一个介词短语语料库，然后通过测量、记录和分析它们的出现频率，最后通过分析语料库来了解关于拉丁语名词短语的变化。语料库本身将以ASCII格式和关系数据库存储，两者都可通过文件传输协议在万维网上获得。分析将集中于含有介词短语的名词短语的论元结构，特别是介词短语所编码的主题角色(如施事、经验者、目标)的扩展。这项研究将提供新的、详细的证据，以揭示更普遍的语言现象，如名词性屈折系统的衰落，涉及从拉丁语到罗曼语的变化。

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.