Different languages use various forms for marking pronominal arguments in minimal utterance: personal pronouns (English and Russian), pronominal clitics (French), personal verbal flections (Latin and other languages with pro-drop). The article offers an interpretation of Latin forms of person as a set of semantic features, which are used instead of traditional symbols (1, 2, 3 person). The authors consider the opportunity of additional semantic features of personality, which can vary in different paradigms and syntagmatic contexts. The authors also analyze the phenomenon of morphemic neutralization (paradigmatic and syntagmatic), which not only neutralizes semantic features relevant to other paradigms and syntagmatic contexts, but can create some new semantic features. Then, on the basis of Konstantin Pozdniakov's ideas, the phenomenon of submorphemic neutralization is analized. In this case, the markers of additional semantic features are represented by the elements segmentally shorter than morphemes. It is this way of expressing personal semantics that creates such feature as “locutor”, uniting both speech act participants (speaker and addressee): nos/vos, noster/voster, me/te in Latin, nous/vous, moi/toi in French, my/vy, men'a/teb'a in Russian. If the paradigm of active verbal flections demonstrates only 6 semantic features of personality, the other afore-mentioned techniques add 20 more semantic features. The semantics of personality in Latin, hence, appears to be more various than its traditional interpretation by means of “open” morphology, the other language dimensions being worth taking into consideration.
Translated title of the contribution THE CATEGORY OF PERSONALITY IN LATIN: CONTEXTS OF OPPOSITIONS AND NEUTRALIZATIONS AS MEANS FOR ADDITIONAL SEMANTIC FEATURES OF PERSONALITY
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)266-280
JournalИндоевропейское языкознание и классическая филология
Volume21
StatePublished - 2017
EventИндоевропейское языкознание и классическая филология (Чтения памяти И. М. Тронского - Санкт-Петербург, Санкт-Петербург, Russian Federation
Duration: 26 Jun 201728 Jun 2017

    Research areas

  • latin, semantic features of personality, paradigmatics, syntagmatics, morphemic neutralization, submorphemic neutralization

ID: 11427457