Linguistic Studies and Essays

Vol. 58 No. 2 (2020)
Articles

Consul tertium or consul tertio? Metalinguistic doubts, syncretism and variation in iterative formulas of public offices

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  • Francesco Rovai
Francesco Rovai
Università di Pisa
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4454/ssl.v58i2.271

Published 2020-11-12

Keywords

  • case syncretism,
  • diachronic typology,
  • frequent adverbs,
  • stylistic variation
Copyright Notice

Abstract

In a passage of his Noctes Atticae, Aulus Gellius discusses the matter of whether the adverbial form tertium or tertio should be used to refer to someone who was holding a magistracy “for the third time”. The debate is a consequence of a functional equivalence that is currently recognized by the Latin reference grammars: with the exception of iterum “for the second time”, the frequency adverbs indicating ordinal rank in a sequence are derived from the ordinal numbers, either in the accusative form (tertium, quartum, etc.) or in the ablative form (tertio, quarto, etc.). Following a sociolinguistic approach, the distribution of accusative-based and ablative-based forms is analyzed in both epigraphic and literary texts. This pattern of variation is seen as part of a more general and long-term process of linguistic change, i.e. case syncretism, whose system’s internal mechanisms are discussed in the light of diachronic typology, with particular reference to their multifactorial causes.

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