Danckaert Lieven. Latin Embedded Clauses: The left periphery

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012. — 387 p. — (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 184). — ASIN B01FKSO746.This book deals with word order in Latin embedded clauses. It concentrates on a specific word order pattern in which one or more constituents occur to the left of a subordinating conjunction. I will call this phenomenon ‘Left Edge Fronting’, abbreviated as LEF. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the basic data and provides the necessary back-ground concerning the theoretical framework that I adopt. Chapter 2 deals with the syntax of adverbial clauses and the distribution of embedded Main Clause Phenomena (MCP). Chapter 3 presents the results of a large-scale corpus study that I have con-ducted. On the basis of these, I will propose that LEF comes in two varieties, namely a topic-like variety that I will call LEF1 (to be treated in depth in Chapters 4 and 5) and a focus-like one that will be referred to as LEF2 (Chapters 6 to 7). The book covers both synchronic and diachronic aspects of the syntax of Latin. The material in this book is meant to be relevant for classical philologists as well as for formal syntacticians. Therefore, I have provided a rather lengthy introduction, mainly for the reader who is not well versed in formal syntactic theory (Chapter 1). Moreover, for the reader not familiar with Latin, all Latin examples are translated and accompanied by a word-for-word gloss. In glossing the Latin and Ancient Greek ex-amples, I followed the guidelines of the Leipzig Glossing Rules, indicating morpheme boundaries wherever possible.In order not to make the glosses unreasonably long, I did not always provide a full morphological analysis. In the nominal domain (nouns, adjectives and pronouns), I only systematically glossed case morphology, adding gen-der and number only where omission of this information might have been confusing. Verbal forms were glossed more completely. However, again for reasons of space, I omitted voice-related information in the case of active and deponent verbs. In other words, whenever a verb appears without a voice gloss, it is (semantically) active. Genu-inely passive verbs (i.e. not deponents, which are only morphologically passive) are glossed as ‘PASS’. In the same vein, in glossing mood morphology, I took indicative mood to be the default, and I did not mark it in the interlinear glosses. Subjunctives and imperatives on the other hand were systematically glossed. Finally, in examples from all other languages I did not indicate morpheme boundaries, unless such had already been done in the original source. A list of abbreviations that are used in the glosses is provided in a separate section (pp. xvii–xviii). The Latin examples mainly come from the corpus described in Chapter 1, but where this corpus did not immediately furnish the data that I needed, I felt free to look at other texts, mainly from Livy or from the prose texts on the CD-ROM Hyperbase (Brunet & Mellet n.d.) which were not already included in the regular corpus. I have used a very limited number of examples from poetry, but only in cases where I was confident that the phenomenon to be illustrated is the same in poetry as in prose.