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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
As a contribution to the study of ‘Latin in use’, we focus in this article on the ways a writer indicates what s/he wants to emphasize within the sentence; the specific linguistic signs s/he uses to that end; and the range of effects that these may have for an alert reader. We have used, on the one hand, recent developments in the study of narrative, discourse and general linguistics and, on the other, the work of earlier pioneers in the field of word order in Latin.
1. The tradition we are following begins in Part II of Henry Sweet, A New English Grammar (Oxford, 1898)Google Scholar. Sweet notes (§ 1760) that ‘in most languages there is a distinction between normal (regular) order and exceptional order’. In order to indicate emphasis ‘there is another more general principle of position-emphasis’, he points out, ‘that of making a word conspicuous by putting it in any abnormal – that is, unexpected-position’ (§ 1766). (Sweet's emphases.)
Within English, his general discussion of emphasis (§§ 1882ff.) has been followed up by Randolph Quirk and his colleagues (1972) and their work is summed up from a communicative view by G. Leech &J. Svartvik (1975) – see below. Their main focus, of course, is on spoken English, so we have had to select and adapt.
2. We have adopted the term ‘chunk’ from Dixon, R. M. W., What is Language? A New Approach to Linguistic Description (London, 1965)Google Scholar, an early stimulus to discourse studies. (See pp. 117–21.)
3. For accessible examples of Wackernagel's Law see Powell, Jonathan, ‘Some Thoughts on Latin Word Order’, FACT Review (Second Series) 4 (Spring 1986), 11–15Google Scholar .
4. Marouzeau, J., L'ordre des mots dans laphrase Latine (Paris, 1922), i.133–48Google Scholar. Noting that the possessive precedes its noun ‘s'il joue dans l'énoncé un rôle important’ (p. 133), and that it precedes in the ratio of roughly 2:1 in Caesar, he adds (a necessary warning) that ‘l'ordre expressif n'est pas nécessairement l'ordre rare’ (p. 147).
We would also like to draw attention here to the pioneering work of H. Darnley Naylor in the field of word order. Writing on Livy, in More Latin and English Idiom(Cambridge, 1915)Google Scholar, he maintains that ‘every departure, however small, from normal order is of the highest importance, if we would understand the meaning aright’. Mollie Dixon has every reason to be grateful for his teaching in the 1940s.
5. Percentages quoted by Panhuis, Dirk G. J., The Communicative Perspective in the Sentence: A Study of Latin Word Order (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1982), p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He confirms the ‘stylistic markedness’ of the initial verb: they ‘contribute to the vivacity of the narrative’; the pattern is ‘emotive from the communicative point of view’ (pp. 146, 149).
6. We are adapting here the definitions used by Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. in A Communicative Grammar of English (London, 1975)Google Scholar: thus, for intensifying adverbs see § 315; for emphatic ‘fronting’ § 427; for pronouns used for emphasis § 444. ‘Underlines’ is our own category: they can be defined as determiners (like ‘all’ or ‘the whole of) which may be regarded as strictly speaking redundant.
7. In How to do things with words (Oxford, 1971Google Scholar) John Austin discusses ‘the force of saying something’. On his view, ‘the traditional “statement” is an abstraction, an ideal… Stating, describing, &c., are just two names among a very great many others for illocutionary acts’ (pp. 147–8). Thus, using his formula, ‘In saying x I was doing y’ (p. 121), we would say that Caesar, in reporting Orgetorix, is conceivably poking fun, pouring scorn, mocking, or raising the alarm (or doing several of these things at once). These phrasal verbs (‘poking fun at’ etc.) are among the thousands commonly used in English to define our ‘speech acts’ – what we are using words to do at a particular moment.
8. For a preliminary treatment of Caesar's ideological position, see: Dixon, Mollie, ‘Latin in use III: US and THEM in the Bellum Gallicum’, Latin Teaching, XXXVII 6 (1986), 23–6Google Scholar.
9. We have selected these phrases from the Penguin translation: Handford, S. A., Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul (Harmondsworth, 1951; 1970 reprint), chapter II, pp. 40ff. However, we ought in fairness to add that, in its treatment of emphasis, this translation must be counted as reasonably typical rather than unusual.Google Scholar
10. See Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. S., A Grammar of Contemporary English (Longman, 1972), pp. 211–12Google Scholar.
11. We aim to show in a further article how subtly these forms of emphasis can be associated with other features, when the writer wishes to convey all the delicacies of attitude, feeling, and mood.
