Indo-European linguistics and classical philology
Yu. A. Shakhov Is there a grammatical category of animacy in Latin? (pp. 975–986)
Author
Yu. A. Shakhov (National Research University "Higher School of Economics")
Pages\n 975–986
Summary\n
The paper examines the notions 'animate' and 'inanimate' which are often used in Latin textbooks in order to explain prepositional or non-preposotional use of the ablative case of the nouns in the function of 'Ablativus auctoris' or 'Ablativus instrumenti/causae/rei efficientis' with passive verbs. I study this 'animacy' of nouns in Latin as compared with the well-known phaenomenon of grammatical animacy in Russian and other Slavic languages and ask whether we can postulate a grammatical category of animacy in Latin in the same sense as we postulate it in Russian. I examine some passages in the writings of Cicero in which we find prepositional as well as non-preposotional use of the ablative case with passive verbs in similar contexts and enumerate some possible motives which may have importance for choosing between prepositional and non-prepositional uses. I conclude that the 'animacy' of nouns in Latin is less regularly expressed by grammatical means and less stable than in Russian and should be considered a semantic category rather than a formal grammatical category.
Keywords\n
Latin, Russian, syntax, animacy
References\n
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