A Diachronic Study of Prepositional Phrases in Latin Noun Phrases

与古代和现代的印欧语系的拉丁语相比，古典拉丁语的一个显著语言特征是它很少使用形容词介词短语，而且是有选择地使用;例如，像“一只鸟在手中”这样的短语很少被发现。传统的语言学研究和语言学研究都表明，在古典拉丁语中，介词短语可以在名词短语中仅承担有限数量的角色（例如，主题，而不是主体，并且仅是有限的目标集合）。 一般认为，后古典拉丁语中的形容词介词短语出现得更频繁，也更自由，这表明早在公元前世纪，拉丁语中形容词介词短语的使用就开始向其罗曼语后代转移。然而，这种转变的证据是相当轶事的，迄今为止还没有进行过控制频率的研究，也没有增加的自由的性质得到过精确的定义，尽管众所周知，在中世纪拉丁语中，代表施事的介词短语得到了很好的证明。 本研究旨在填补我们对拉丁语到罗曼语的变化的认识中的一个空白，首先通过收集公元前世纪到公元前6世纪的拉丁语散文文本中的形容词介词短语语料库，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，这两种格式都可以通过FTP在万维网上获得。 分析将集中在包含介词短语的名词短语的论元结构上，特别是主题角色的种类的扩展（例如，施事者、经历者、目标），介词短语来编码。这项研究将提供新的和详细的证据，这将有助于阐明更普遍的语言现象，如从拉丁语到罗曼语的变化所涉及的名词性屈折系统的衰退。

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.