Short description:

This book applies an SFL-inspired, multi-dimensional approach to Latin linguistics, offering fresh insights into Latin narrative tenses while addressing challenges posed by its closed-corpus nature. 

Long description:

This book applies an SFL-inspired, multi-dimensional approach to Latin linguistics, offering fresh insights into Latin narrative tenses while addressing challenges posed by its closed-corpus nature. Bridging Classics and Linguistics, it categorizes the functional potential of the verbal categories ?tense? and ?aspect? and reshapes existing labels through a quantitative analysis of select historiographical narratives. Aerts elucidates the communicative subtleties of tense and aspect in Latin and highlights their relevance to modern linguistic methodologies and cross-linguistic investigations.

Contributing to functional linguistic theory, the volume explores the semantic boundaries of tense and aspect in human languages, uncovering previously unrecognized uses in Latin and addressing obstacles in historical language analysis. It showcases how modern tools enhance reproducibility and deepen our understanding of grammatical systems, with implications for the study of Latin, Romance languages, and beyond. This book will appeal to scholars in linguistics, classical philology, and historical linguistics.

"Latin Tense and Aspect in 3D advances our understanding of the meaning and usage of the Latin tense system; Aerts' work on Late Latin material is particularly valuable."

Wolfgang de Melo ? Professor of Classical Philology, Oxford University

"In Latin Tense and Aspect in 3D, Simon Aerts presents an innovative, multidimensional perspective on tense and aspect, uniquely examined through the three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is a groundbreaking addition to SFL and a comprehensive, insightful resource deepening our understanding of the functional richness of verbal categories in Latin."

Miriam Taverniers - Professor of English Linguistics, Ghent University

Table of Contents:

List of Tables

List of Figures

Preface

Chapter 1    A modern approach to languages from the past     

1.1     Introduction

1.1.1  Latin: a tale of a lot more than one language

1.1.2  Book structure     

1.2     Case in point: the Latin tense system 

1.2.1  Latin tense morphology 

1.2.2  Latin tense semantics     

1.2.3  Relative tense theory     

1.2.4  Aspectual theory  

1.3     Essential forms and functions  

1.3.1  Verb tenses

1.3.2  Tense

1.3.3  Aspect       

1.3.4  Aktionsart  

1.3.5  Situations and events     

1.3.6  Foreground-background 

1.4     Systemic Functional Linguistics        

1.4.1  Metafunctions      

1.4.2  Stratification        

1.4.3  Indeterminacy, choice and change     

1.4.4  System networks and the cline of instantiation      

1.5     Towards a 3D-approach to Latin tense and aspect 

1.5.1  Multidimensional systems in SFL      

1.5.2  Usage-based language data and the importance of context

1.5.3  Audience involvement and its encoding in the lexicogrammar  

1.5.4  Metafunctional levels of TENSE and ASPECT     

1.5.5  Systematization of traditional labels  

Notes

Chapter 2    From theory to practice: an exposition and illustration of the applied methodology       

2.1     Three-dimensional tense and aspect in Latin, Romance and English

2.1.1  Tense

2.1.2  Aspect       

2.2     Historical pragmatics: problems and solutions       

2.2.1  Aspects of working with closed-corpus languages 

2.2.2  Towards an operationalization of pragmatic interpretations

2.3     An exposition of the applied close-reading methodology 

Notes

Chapter 3    A corpus-based description of tense usage in Latin

3.1     Foregrounded events and situations   

3.1.1  The narrative perfect, the annalistic present and the historic present

3.1.2  The scenic imperfect      

3.1.3  The ingressive perfect and the complexive perfect 

3.1.4  The perfect of success and the progressive imperfect      

3.2     Simultaneous situations and events    

3.2.1  The historic present and the narratorial perfect      

3.2.2  The perfect of cessation 

3.2.3  The circumstantial imperfect and simultaneous events    

3.3     Anteriors and resultatives

3.3.1  The pluperfect tense      

3.3.2  The perfect and imperfect tenses with past anterior meaning     

3.3.3  Past resultatives vs. past simultaneous situations   

3.4     The narrative tenses in non-narrative discourse     

3.4.1  Absolute past situations 

3.4.2  The present perfect

3.4.3  The actual, general and literary present and the present resultative      

3.5     Marked textual meanings of the narrative tenses   

3.5.1  The anticipatory present, the suspensive imperfect and the perfect of conclusion 

3.5.2  The authorial present     

Notes

Chapter 4    Aspect in the Latin tense system: a matter of perspective

4.1     The survival of aspect in the language of Gregory of Tours       

4.2     Narrative perspectives: a linguistic and literary tradition 

4.2.1  External perspectives: the voices of the narrator and the author 

4.2.2  Internal perspectives: the illusion of unmediated truth     

4.2.3  Eyewitness perspectives: showing vs. telling

4.2.4  Temporal anomalies in the subjunctive: displacement encoded in the grammar    

Notes

Chapter 5    General conclusions   

Chapter 6    References  

6.1     Primary sources   

6.2     Secondary sources

Index