This chapter focuses on morpho-syntactical phenomena that are typically brushed off with labels such as ‘archaism’ or ‘colloquialism’ (e.g. siet; medio-passive infinitives ending in -ier; med; familiai; absence of subordinator ut; absence of subject accusatives). These labels provide neither an explanation nor an assessment that takes their functions and distributions into account. The analysis of distribution patterns shows whether a type of scansion, a morpheme, or a construction that stands out from the angle of an Indo-Europeanist or that of a classicist is in fact normal in early Latin, or marked in some way. For example, the discrepancy between the different conjugations shows that Plautus and Terence do not pick forms in -ier and then try to fit them into the line; rather, they write their lines and only pick forms in -ier if it cannot be helped. This has implications for assessing the stylistic value of forms in -ier in contemporary inscriptions or in Lucretius. This analysis, in turn, can help us to understand early texts in their own right, and aids us in reconstruction or understanding how a Roman of the classical period would have felt about a specific phenomenon.

This chapter examines the history of the most frequent metres in early Latin comedy, iambic senarii and trochaic septenarii. While persisting into the classical period, these metres become less prominent; early funerary epigrams can still be composed in iambic senarii, but elegiacs predominate, and there are also significant changes in prosody and versification rules. No sharp chronological contrast is observed in the tradition of dramatic iambo-trochaics. The main differences between early and classical iambo-trochaics are not metrical, but prosodic; they consist above all in the elimination or reduction of prosodic variants, such as original length of vowel endings (-āt for -ăt), iambic shortening, sigmatic ecthlipsis; these phenomena are common in Plautus but absent, e.g., from Varro and Phaedrus. Conversely, lengthening with muta cum liquida, which is absent from comedy, is well attested in imperial iambo-trochaics, including e.g. Phaedrus and inscriptions. Even in this respect, however, one should be wary of neat chronological generalisations, especially because the reduction of prosodic variants is already attested in early authors such as Terence.