cuzzolin, some remarks on quia as a subordinator ater verbs of saying and thinking

8/21/2019 Cuzzolin, Some Remarks on Quia as a Subordinator Ater Verbs of Saying and Thinking

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DOI ./joll-- Journal of Latin Linguistics ; (): –

Pierluigi Cuzzolin

Some remarks on quia as a subordinator

aer verbs of saying and thinking Abstract: The Accusativus cum Infinitivo, a syntactic construction proper to Latin

and a few other Indo-European languages, was gradually replaced in Latin by anexplicit subordinate clause and did not survive in Romance, except as a rathersophisticated Latinism in literary texts. The new subordinate clause was intro-duced in particular by the conjunctions quod and quia, whose occurrences out-number those of other conjunctions such as quoniam or ut .

However, the fact that quod and quia occur much more frequently than theother conjunctions and oen in the same context should not conceal the fact thatthere are some basic differences between them. In particular, as for their origin,whereas the development of quod as subordination marker can be explainedaccording to the dynamics of the internal history of Latin, nevertheless a socio-linguistic analysis of the first examples of quia shows that this conjunction is theresult of Greek influence.

Keywords: subordination; sociolinguistics; Graecism

Pierluigi Cuzzolin: Università di Bergamo, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature Straniere e

Comunicazione, Piazzetta Verzeri, 24219 Bergamo. E-mail: [email protected]

Viro docto atque magistro Antonino Bartoněk, gratissimo discipuli animo

Foreword

As is well known from the history of Latin, beginning in the first century CE (if noteven earlier; see below, Section 3.) the Accusativus cum Infinitivo (henceforth AcI)started to be replaced gradually by a complement clause, regularly introduced bya conjunction as a subordination marker (the AcI had none) and with the verboccurring in a finite mood, either indicative or subjunctive. In addition, its gram-matical subject was regularly expressed in the nominative case.

This change occurred with numerous classes of predicates, but the phenom-enon was particularly remarkable with the predicates of saying and thinking. In-cidentally, while other and possibly more precise labels are used to classify such

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classes of predicates, I still prefer to use the terms saying and thinking becausethey explicitly refer to one of the most crucial parameters of analysis, i.e., theirhigher or lower degree of assertivity.

The dramatic, though gradual, replacement of the AcI – one of the mostrelevant in the history of the Latin syntax because of its consequences on thegrammatical system – has been dealt with in a huge number of works in the lasthundred and thirty years.

Nevertheless, despite the many contributions devoted to this topic, severalaspects of this change, including the way in which it developed, remain problem-atic or unsatisfactorily explained thus far. Several motivations that have beenproposed to account for the general change itself, i.e., why Latin abandoned the AcI and replaced it with the quod-construction, are not all equally convincing.

Many pages have been written about the substitution of the subordinationpattern: not only the different aspects of the change have been stressed, but allthe relevant parameters involved therein, i.e., person, number, mood, modality,speaker’s commitment, to mention only a few crucial ones. These have been re-vised, and their relevance to the change has been reassessed as thoroughly aspossible.

For instance, investigations have revealed that the moods employed, i.e., theindicative and the subjunctive, do not occur randomly: it has been quite reliably

ascertained that the indicative is mainly associated with factual assertions,whereas the subjunctive is rather associated with possible, non-factual, or evencounterfactual assertions (on this still useful distinction, see Cuzzolin [1994:60–74]; but further investigations could help to complete the picture in moredetail).

In addition, in one of the few contributions devoted to the analysis of Latin AcI in typological perspective, Christian Lehmann (1989: 177–178) has correctlypointed out that such a construction was structurally rather different from themajority of the subordinate clauses and it was not well integrated with the sub-ordination system of Latin. Therefore, the adoption of a construction structurallyconforming to the regular pattern exhibited by the other subordinate clauses inLatin, seems to be a plausible, possibly even inescapable development, without

A concise but very useful assessment of the previous investigations can now be found in Greco(2012: 15–50). Aer Mayen’s seminal work (1889), the contribution that stands out among theother fundamental steps in the research is Perrochat (1932). Cuzzolin (1994) is the latest contribu-tion explicitly devoted to a reassessment of the whole topic from Early to Late Latin, at least tothe best of my knowledge. This term is not employed here in the technical sense of the construction grammar, eventhough it can be quite close to it.


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Some remarks on quia

thereby implying any teleological dri. Ultimately, typology can help us to envis-age at least one good reason for this change.

However, as I had tried to point out some years ago (Cuzzolin 1994), the usage

of finite moods not only was better suitable for the grammatical system of Latinthan the infinitive, but offered some other advantages: for instance, it enabled thespeaker/writer to exploit semantic nuances rigidly neutralized in a constructionsuch as the AcI .

() ( Bell. Hisp. 36, 1; tr. Way 1955) dum haec geruntur legati Carteienses renuntiauerunt quod Pompeium in potes-

tatem haberent

‘In the course of these proceedings envoys from Carteia duly reported that

they had Pompeius in their hands’

Just to illustrate this particular feature, in an example like (1), the employment ofthe quod-construction instead of the AcI is crucial: the subjunctive mood allowsthe writer not to commit himself to truth of the content of the subordinate clause,inasmuch as the claim that Pompeius was in the hands of the Carteienses was notcompletely true (see also Cuzzolin 2013: 29). Such a fundamental distinction be-tween the writer’s opinion and the envoys’ reported opinion in example (1) would

have been simply impossible with the AcI : in a structure like that, exclusively al-lowing for a factive reading, the speaker/writer’s commitment to the truth of theassertion was implicitly taken for granted.

The assumption that the indicative and the subjunctive moods are usedas commitment marker and non-commitment markers, respectively, is to a verylarge extent correct, although cases exist where it is difficult to decide whetherthis is the criterion primarily responsible for the mood distribution.

Another puzzling, certainly under-investigated aspect of this change is therelationship between the conjunction that introduces a complement clause andthe different degree of the speaker/writer’s commitment.

The selection of the conjunctions that introduce the complement clause hasnot received due attention thus far, as if it were a minor point within the wholeinvestigation. In particular, why and how the specific conjunctions involved de-veloped the function of introducing the complement clauses are issues that havebeen dealt with only to a partial extent: neither of them originally was a simplesubordination marker. According to a widely accepted but ultimately simplisticviewpoint, quia would be associated with objective statements, whereas quod

would rather correlate with subjective statements. If the situation were reallyso, then it would always be easy to envisage the motivation of the occurrence ofquia and quod. However, the data show that quia can also occur in subjective


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statements with the verb expressed in the subjunctive mood, and quod is easyto find in objective sentences with the verb occurring in the indicative mood. Inother words, pairing quod = non-factual and quia = factual turns out to be a ten-

dency, not a mandatory rule (Cuzzolin 1994).Moreover, it must also be borne in mind that other conjunctions are attested,albeit less frequently, such as quoniam, ut , cum, quomodo (still useful Mayen1889), but only some of them are attested since the AcI started to be replaced. Forexample, a conjunction such as quomodo typically occurs rather late for the firsttime but becomes more frequent in Late Latin (from the third century onward)and especially in the so-called Christian Latin (Herman 1963).

For the purposes of the present paper, I will focus on quod and quia, sincethey occur in the vast majority of the cases recorded, at least at the beginning of

the process of replacement, concentrating first on quia.Even in the best handbooks and historical grammars this change is not

treated with the depth it deserves and several aspects of this change are glossedover rather quickly, if they are mentioned at all.

A fundamental aspect of this treatment is the fact that apparently no dis-tinction is drawn between the functions of the two conjunctions, as if they wereperfectly interchangeable as subordinators. This assumption is correct only to alimited extent.

First of all, there is an etymological difference between the two conjunctions,no matter how close to one another they are:

On the evidence of L[atin] and Av[estan] . . . in PIE there were two related paradigms whichwere widely confused. . . . Not only has leveling confused the paradigm of the stems in *kw -,but the original makeup of the many non-paradigmatic forms . . . can hardly even beguessed at, so diverse are the attested forms. (Sihler 1995: 397–398)

Secondly, there is a curious asymmetry that involves the meaning of these two

conjunctions: even though both conjunctions are supposed to be the direct casesingular and plural of the relative pronoun and of the interrogative/indefinitepronoun, respectively, quod developed a polysemic value while quia basically didnot, given that its fundamental meaning was ‘because’, obviously except aerverbs of saying and thinking.

I just wonder whether this difference is ultimately to be traced back to the basically phoric(both anaphoric and cataphoric) function of the stem quo-, opposed to a different function (deic-tic?) of the stem of the interrogative-indefinite pronoun, i.e., qui-. The issue cannot be discussedhere.


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Therefore the basic question can be formulated as follows: it is not surprisingthat the AcI was replaced by a subordinate clause structurally conforming to thesyntactic pattern exhibited by the other subordinate clauses of Latin, since such

syntactic changes are not infrequently documented among the world’s languages(Cuzzolin 1994). This leads to the question, why then to replace the AcI by meansof a subordinate introduced by quod and especially quia? In this contribution I tryto provide an answer to this question.

The present paper is organized as follows: in Sections 2 and 3 attention willbe concentrated on the correlative diptych, the pattern from which quod probablyderived its function as subordination marker; in Sections 4 and 5 the origin ofquia will be dealt with, also making a comparison with the Megarian form σά,perfectly corresponding to quia; in Section 6 the quia-construction will be ana-

lyzed according to recent proposals along sociolinguistic parameters. Some finalconclusions will follow.

A look at the correlative diptych

It is well established that the original pair of the correlative diptych was formedby the two pronominal roots *k w o- . . . *to- (Haudry 1973). This precise sequence

is well documented in the oldest IE languages such as Hittite and Vedic. It espe-cially occurs in some gnomic sentences such as quot capita, tot sententiae thatbelong to the oldest layer of Latin and are probably to ascribe to one of the earlystages of Proto-Indo-European.

As pointed out many years ago by the French scholar Armand Minard (quotedby Haudry 1973), beside the “regular” correlative diptych also the so-called“inverse correlative diptych” is attested, in which the sequence of the two ele-ments is reversed, giving as a result the sequence *to- . . . *k w o-.

The fortunes and misfortunes of the two subtypes of correlative diptych in thevarious IE languages where they are attested would deserve an investigation onits own. It is interesting to observe that in Latin one of the changes it underwentwas the substitution of the pronominal element *to- with another pronominalstem, i.e., *i-, the one that occurs in is, ea, id or even the stem *ho- of the pronounand adjective hic, haec, hoc. This change simply witnesses the progressive decayof the stem *to- in Latin: it did not survive as an independent pronominal stem,but only in some opaque formation like is-te ‘this’ (with a different apophonicdegree) or as a base for adverbial conjunctions such as tum ‘then’. But, as I had

tried to point out years ago (Cuzzolin 1994), the correlative diptych is one of thesources – probably the most important – of the replacement of the AcI throughthe quod-sentence. If the correlative diptych is a pattern from which the type


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of subordination aer verbs of saying and thinking is supposed to derive, it isreasonable to imagine that the second member of the pair, i.e., quod , underwenta reanalysis and ultimately was re-categorized as a conjunction, once the first

element of the pair started to be omitted. This happened no matter whether itwas based on the stem *to-, *i-, or *ho-. This crucial shi is shortly described inHofmann and Szantyr’s syntax (1971: 572; see the next section).

From the beginning, quod and quia maintain some basic differences, whichhave been better investigated in the late stages of Latin. This is probably due tothe fact that the fate of quod and quia diverged in the history of the Romancelanguages.

Remarks on the origin of quod

There are still many details on the origin and history of quod and quia in EarlyLatin that remain to be investigated in order to precisely understand how theycould develop their function as subordination markers. However, the situationhas been better described for the origin and development of quod, than has thehistory of quia, which is more puzzling.

A long quotation from Hofmann and Szantyr’s syntax is in order here:

Die Entwicklung der Konjunktion quod aus dem Ntr. Sing. des Relativums läßt sich nochim Altlatein verfolgen. Zum Teil ist es direkter Kasus dieses Pron. . . . so quod ‚wenn’ desgesetzsprachlichen Typus idque ei . . . facere liceto, quod sine malo pequlatuu fiat (Lex Corn.de XX quaest. (CIL I2 587), 1,4, ferner in quod ‚was das betri daß’ des Typus quod ad mescribis de sorore tua, testis erit ipsa Cic. Att . 1, 5, 2. Zum andern Teil ist quod Akk. des innerenObjekts, der wie id usw. . . . früh adverbialisiert wurde und die Bedeutung ‘daß’ (aus ‘inwelchem Punkte’), dann ‚weil’ erlangt hat. Z. B. Plt. Aul. 199 est quod te volo . . . appellare,dann freier 203 est quod visam domum . . . Wie beim eigentlichen Relativ steht o im Haupt-satz ein Korrelativ, z. B. Plt. Asin. 262 sed quid hoc, quod picus ulmum tundit . . . Auch das rein

kausale quod zeigt seine relative Natur noch deutlich durch die demonstrativen Determina-tiva im Hauptsatz. (Hofmann and Szantyr 1971: 572)

This is precisely what our data show, at least in the two oldest examplesattested:

The issue of the origin of It. che, Fr. que, Sp. que, Port. que, Rum. că, all meaning ‘that’ goesfar beyond the aim of the present paper. However, it is worth pointing out that the hypothesisthat these conjunctions would derive from quia, although generally accepted, is not completelysatisfactory.


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() (Plaut. Asin. 52–53; tr. de Melo 2011)

Equidem scio iam filius quod amet meus Istanc meretricem e proxumo Philaenium

‘Well, I already know that my son is in love with that prostitute from nextdoor, Philaenium’

(=) ( Bell. Hisp. 36, 1; tr. Way 1955) dum haec geruntur legati Carteienses renuntiauerunt quod Pompeium in

potestatem haberent

‘In the course of these proceedings envoys from Carteia duly reported thatthey had Pompeius in their hands’

The examples just quoted are chronologically ordered; yet, the example fromPlautus still raises some problems that I have discussed elsewhere (Cuzzolin1994, 2013: 36). The main source of quod as a subordinator aer verbs of sayingand thinking is therefore the correlative diptych. That is, the development thatthe correlative diptych underwent brought a new subordinating conjunction, i.e.,quod, into existence. The conjunction developed its new function as a sub-ordination marker out of a coordination pattern that made it possible for quod tobe used with its new function aer these verbs. All this happened independentlyof the influence Greek could exert on Latin, a fact that became culturally relevantcertainly at a later stage. This idea has been constantly upheld in the last decadesdespite many counterarguments (Calboli 2009).

However, according to the data we possess, it is clear that the correlative dip-tych is responsible only for the origin of quod as a subordinator, not for quia. InEarly Latin – the only stage relevant here for our investigation – the data we pos-sess never attest a diptych where the second member of the pair is quia. In addi-tion, quia never introduces complement clauses depending on nominal or adjec-tival predicates. Obviously, quia frequently occurs preceded by an antecedent.

If not indicated otherwise, all translations are taken from the Loeb Classical Library texts. According to the parameters of analysis, our data clearly show that the substitution of the AcI aer verbs of saying and thinking gradually spread from the more assertive to the less assertive.Since scire ‘to know’ by definition possesses a very low degree of assertivity, it should havereplaced the AcI rather late. In fact it is the first verb that documents this change in the history ofLatin. I am aware that phenomena like the one I am dealing with in this paper have also been dis-cussed and analyzed within the framework of (one of) the grammaticalization models available.However, I prefer to leave out of the present paper the issue concerning the relationship betweenthe substitution of the AcI and grammaticalization. Even in this case, further investigations are needed.


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However, at least in the beginning the set of its antecedents was limited to ad-verbs or pronouns based on the stem *k w i-/k w o-. Only at a later stage the set ofantecedents of quia started to coincide with the set that used to occur in the dip-

tych with quod.But, if the correlative diptych could not have been the pattern from whichquia developed its function as a subordinator aer verbs of saying and thinking,what is its source then? Although the question has remained basically unchangedfor more than one century, it is now possible to formulate some novel remarks onthis conjunction, as argued below.

Remarks on the origin of quia

It is usually assumed that at a certain stage quod and quia should sound syn-onymous and it is likely that they had to be interchangeable. Formulated differ-ently, quod and quia ended up sharing the same functional distribution, more orless to the same extent. But this assumption tells us nothing about the origin ofquia.

However, at the very beginning of this process, the situation should havebeen different and between quod and quia a clear difference must have existed for

the speaker of Latin. The essential on this point is expressed in Hofmann andSzantyr (1971):

Seine [of quia; PC] ursprüngliche Funktion ist nur noch im altlateinischen . . . undarchaisierenden . . . quianam ‚warum denn’ erhalten . . . Sonst lässt sich die alte Natur desbereits vorliterarisch zu einer Nebensatzpartikel gewordenen quia nur mehr erschließen.So zeigt es als kausale Konjunktion seine Entstehung aus fragendem ‚warum’ bei Plt. undTer. noch darin, dass es im Dialog sehr häufig in der entstehenden Antwort auf einenach dem Grund sich erkundigende Frage des Partners steht . . . (Hofmann and Szantyr1971: 574)

It has already been observed above that, contrary to quod, the antecedent ofquia was almost always corradical. It means that quia developed its function asa subordinator out of a pair in which both members were k w -elements, corre-sponding even etymologically to the wh-elements of the generative tradition,such as the ones that occur in example (4). Here the antecedent is the interroga-tive pronoun quid ‘what’. In (5) the antecedent is the interrogative adverb quor ‘why’:

The fact that in some critical editions editors read cur is irrelevant.


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() (Plaut. Epid. 58–59; tr. De Melo 2011) nam quid ita? :: quia cottidie ipse ad me ab legione epistulas mittebat . ‘How so? Because he himself sent me letters from the army on a daily basis’

() (Plaut. Amph. 687; tr. de Melo 2011) quor negas? :: quia uera didici dicere ‘Why are you denying it? :: Because I’ve learnt to speak the truth’

Unfortunately, documentation is neither so old nor so complete to enable us tofollow step by step the process by which quia changes its grammatical status fromthe supposedly plural of quid to a conjunction. The path along which it graduallydeveloped can only be reasonably hypothesized. As mentioned above, if quia is

the original plural forms of the neuter pronoun quid, it is necessary to supposethat it lost its pronominal nature to acquire a more general, adverb-like status.From a formal viewpoint, the hypothesis that quia is the neuter nominative-

accusative plural of the interrogative stem *k w i- is generally accepted. It has longbeen noted that quia would perfectly correspond to the form σά ‘what?’, attestedin the Greek dialect spoken in Megara, both from a formal and functional point ofview: “Formal und sachlich entspricht dem quia-nam gr. megar. σά μᾱ ́ ν . . . ; demmegar. σά entspricht lautlich ntr. plur. indef. ion. (ἅ)σσα att. (ἅ)ττα aus k w ia̯”(Leumann 1972: 473; this etymology is accepted and simply repeated as such inBeekes’ 2010 Etymological Dictionary of Greek ).

Nonetheless, this point deserves further discussion.

Lat. quia and Meg. σά: a real correspondence?

Although between Lat. quia and Meg. σά there is a formally perfect correspon-dence, the hypothesis that they continue the same original form *k w ih̯ 2 was chal-lenged a century ago by Wackernagel:

Aber schon Ahrens . . . hat das Bedenken erhoben, daß der Plural des Neutrums in solchemSinn ungebräuchlich sei; niemals kommt τίνα st. τί ‚warum’ vor. Wiederum vom Standpunktdes Latein aus hat Skutsch . . . quia für den Plural in Anspruch genommen; das ist formellgleich untadelig, wie die entsprechende Erklärung von σά, τά und semasiologisch gleichunwahrscheinlich: wo heißt quae ‚warum?’?. Es scheint am richtigsten, sich vorerst mit derTatsache der Identität von quia mit σά, τά zu begnügen und ein indogermanisches (odergraeco-italisch?) *qia̯ anzusetzen. (Wackernagel 1912/1913: 268; my emphasis).

I wonder whether this is the reason why Bartoněk (2011: 178) describes this form as neurčité zájmeno ‘indefinite pronoun’. It must also be noted that the form *qia̯ is an old notation. It cor-responds to the updated form with laryngeal *k w ih̯ 2.


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As far as I know, the challenge issued by Wackernagel has never been consideredand discussed by linguists; it still needs an adequate investigation, especiallyfrom a theoretical viewpoint. It is probably correct to claim that an interrogative

pronoun used in the plural represents a highly marked form and surely this pointwould deserve a typological survey of the world’s languages; but, to the best ofmy knowledge, such a survey has not been conducted yet. The solution is there-fore to accept, at least for the time being, the correspondence between quia andσά on a phonological and morphological basis.

From the functional viewpoint it is interesting to compare quia and σά/τά, tothe extent that it is possible on the basis of the very few examples.

The comparison is that of the Greek form σά, attested in the Megariandialect, employed by Aristophanes in the Acharnanians a couple of times,

clearly as a parody:

() (Aristophanes, Acharnanians 757; tr. Henderson 1998) αὐτίκ ᾿ ἄρ ᾿ ἀπαλλάξεσϑε πραγμάτων. :: σά μάν; ‘Then you’ll soon be rid of your troubles.’ ‘That’s right’

() (Aristophanes, Acharnanians 784; tr. Henderson 1998)

ἀλλ ᾿ οὐδὲ ϑύσιμός ἐστιν αὑτηγί. :: σά μάν; πᾶ δ ᾿ οὐκὶ ϑύσιμός ἐστιν; ‘But this one isn’t even suitable for sacrifice’. ‘Indeed? In what way unsuitable

for sacrifice?’

In the scholia of this comedy, v. 757 is explicitly glossed with the following words:

σά μάν. ἀντὶ τοῦ τί μήν. τί γὰρ ἄλλο καταλείπεται ἢ τοὖτο;‘σά μάν. Instead of τί μήν. What else does remain other than this?’

Unfortunately for us, in the scholia there is no mention of any feature that the

audience could have identified as taken from a dialect nor is any other informa-tion given on how Attic speakers could react to this form.

The presence of the Megarian dialect in Aristophanes’ comedies is analyzed by Colvin (1999),and some useful remarks occur in Bartoněk (2009). I quoted from the most recent Aritophanes’ edition, which is undoubtedly correct but prag-matically neutralized and stylistically plain. More vivid and pragmatically satisfying was theprevious translation by Bickley Rogers, first published in 1924. I quote it here: ‘So you’ll lose allyour troubles. What for no?’ (757), ‘But she’s no good for offerings. What for no? What for naeguid for offerins?’ (784). The text from which I quote is Wilson (1975).


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However, the two examples from Aristophanes, if they are reliable as linguis-tic documents and do not simply mock the uneducated figure of a countryman,already show the first step of the path that leads to their status of conjunction. In

neither example does σά performs the proper function of interrogative pronounbut rather possesses the generic value of interrogative marker; and the chancethat in example (4) it could well refer to πραγμάτων (the troubles the guy fromMegara is suffering) is actually non-existent.

Interestingly, the fact that Aristophanes uses σά μάν twice in his comedy re-veals that this pronoun should be easily recognizable and typical of the varietyspoken in Megara; it is also likely that it should be heard frequently enough tomake it popular and recognizable as such also to the speakers of other Greekdialects in which this particular form was absent. What I want to stress is the

fact that it was probably more widespread in everyday colloquial speech than wesuppose.

The same pronoun also occurs in Pindar, although only one time, as τά, theform corresponding to σά, which is usually classified among the boeotisms, thetraits typical of the Boeotian dialect that occurs in Pindar’s odes:

() (Pindar, Olympian 1, 82–84; tr. Race 1997) ϑανεῖν δ ᾿ οἷσιν ἀνάγκα, τά κέ τις ἀνώνυμον

γῆρας ἐν σκότῳ καϑήμενος ἕψοι μάταν, ἁπάντων καλῶν ἄμμορος; ‘But since men must die, why would anyone sit in darkness and coddle a nameless old age to no use, deprived of all noble deeds?’

Also in this example, syntactically τά is extra-clausal inasmuch as it does not fillany argumental position. Its status is more conjunction-like, i.e., the first stepalong the path that leads to a full conjunction status, like in the case of σά wehave just considered.

Unfortunately the two forms – both the Megarian variant σά and the Boeotianτά – do not occur in sufficiently broad contexts as to allow us to draw any con-clusion about its syntax, even though it is clear that in the examples cited thefunction of both σά and τά is adverbial or adverb-like. This means that this in-terrogative pronoun, at least according to our very scanty number of examples,had already developed new functions during the fih century beside the originalone.

Although the doubts expressed by Wackernagel (and Ahrens before him)have some validity, nonetheless it is difficult not to accept the equivalence be-tween quia and σά, at least formally. As far as I know, there is no language of the


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world in which the unmarked form of the pronoun to ask something is plural.Nonetheless that quia and σά are the plural of the interrogative pronoun seems tobe the likeliest analysis.

A sociolinguistic analysis of thequia-construction

At the beginning of this paper I used “quod-construction” to provide a generallabel that defines the type of syntactic patterns that replaced the AcI . For the timebeing, however, it is necessary to employ the specific label “quia-construction.”

This term exclusively refers to the complement clauses introduced by quia, distin-guishing it from the quod-construction (which in general terms, beside the quod-construction proper, is used as hyperonym for both constructions; on this termi-nological problem, see Cuzzolin and Molinelli 2013: 98–99, 102). This seems to benecessary, because the quia-construction shows a couple of peculiarities that arenot shared by the quod-construction.

The regularly expected replacement of the AcI by means of the correlativediptych was only represented by the conjunction quod. The issue therefore ishow quia could “creep into” the functional domain of quod. The fact that thesetwo conjunctions are close to each other (though not identical!) both in func-tion and in etymology cannot be a satisfactory reason to account for the factthat quia started being used where quod was expected (but see below). In ad-dition, it must be observed that this correspondence probably sounded ac-ceptable to the speaker only at a relatively late stage, and was not immediatelyestablished.

Recently, however, aer decades when the replacement of the AcI was inves-tigated from the point of view of its consequences on the grammatical system of

Latin, the distribution of quod and quia aer verbs of saying and thinking havebeen re-examined from a sociolinguistic perspective. And some interesting pro-posals have been put forward that deserve some comments.

This perspective, although not completely new, was not extensively exploitedin the oldest handbooks. In Hofmann and Szantyr’s volume devoted to syntaxand stylistics, for example, we read the following statement:

Im allgemeinen ist hervorzuheben: die Häufigkeit von quia im Altlatein erklärt sich daraus,dass es hier der hauptsachliche Träger des kausalen Satzverhältnisses ist . . . Nach denVerba sentiendi und declarandi erscheint quia weder altlateinisch noch klassisch . . . ; esbegegnet hier im freien Gebrauch zuerst . . . in den vulgären Partien des Petron. (Hofmannand Szantyr 1971: 585–586; my emphasis)


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According to the two renowned scholars, quod and quia aer verbs of saying andthinking never occur in Old or Classical Latin, but only from post-Classical Latinonward, and freely used in the vulgar parts of Petronius’s novel. That these two

conjunctions are freely used (im freien Gebrauch) is exactly what scholars haverecently started calling into question. First, let us quote the four examples thatoccur in Petronius’s text as it is preserved. Beside each example I also indicate thecharacter who utters the sentence:

() (Petron. 45, 10; tr. Heseltine 1913) Sed subolfacio quia nobis epulum daturus est Mammaea, binos denarios et

meis (Echion) ‘My nose prophesies a good meal from Mammaea, two pence each for me

and mine’

() (Petron. 46, 4; tr. Heseltine 1913) Ego illi iam tres cardeles occidi, et dixi quia mustella comedit (Echion) ‘I killed three of his goldfinches just lately, and said a weasel had eaten

them’

() (Petron. 71, 9 tr. Heseltine 1913) Scis enim, quod epulum dedi binos denarios (Trimalchio)

‘You remember that I gave a free dinner worth two denarii a head’() (Petron. 131, 7; tr. Allinson 1930; available on line)

At illa gaudio exultans: “uides, inquit, Chrysis mea, uides, quod aliis leporemexcitavi?” (Proselenos)

‘ “Look, Chrysis, look” she cried, “how I have started the hare for other folkto course” ’

The first two examples, quoted here in the order in which they occur in the novel,

are uttered by Echion, who is qualified as centonarius (‘the fireman who usedmats for extinguishing fires’, according to the definition provided by the Oxford Latin Dictionary , s.v.), surely a poor guy in a very low social position, whose lan-guage has been described as one of the most incorrect in the whole novel (Boyce1991; Dell’Era 1970). The third extract occurs in one of the speeches that Trimal-chio, the wealthy and vulgar parvenu, gives during his famous dinner. The fourthand last example is uttered by an old magic woman and procuress.

Also the names chosen are etymologically transparent and reveal somethingabout the characters they are associated with: if it is easy to interpret Trimalchio

Strangely enough, in Heseltine’s translation this example remains in Latin.


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as ‘the one who is X three times’, where the prefix Tri- performs the function ofthe superlative of X, whatever – malchio can be related to, and Proselenos alludesto her being very old (her name could be paraphrased as ‘the one who was born

before the moon’), the name Echion, the person that apparently is the only onewho employs quia, is not telling and an etymological approach to the word ἔχις‘snake’ is rather useless.

There is, however, another viewpoint in which personal names can cast morelight on the issue dealt with here. It is interesting that the name Ἐχίων, contraryto the other two, is an actual Greek name, documented exclusively in SouthernItaly, and more precisely in Campania, once at Puteoli, once at Herculaneum, andtwice at Pompeii (Fraser and Matthews 1997: 184). Therefore, it is very likely thatthe Latin spoken by this character mirrors some typical traits of Latin, diatopi-

cally marked as a variety spoken in Campania. But I wonder whether the area in-volved where the roman plot takes place and Echion lives could have been colo-nized by people coming from the regions where the speakers are supposed tohave retained σά μάν as a linguistic habit. Obviously, this is only a suggestionthat needs further investigations, which may result in a revision of the Greek colo-nization in Southern Italy.

But let’s go on. To József Herman, for instance, one owes this interesting andmore substantial remark, explicitly concerning the choice of the conjunction

quia:

[À propos de quia], non encore généralisé de l’usage « vulgaire ». Il devait s’agir d’unerareté, d’une variante frustre et peut-être même légèrement comique des complétives avecquod, elles-mêmes peu courantes encore. (Herman 2003: 141)

According to the late Hungarian scholar, quia could have been, and probably was,a rare variant of quod, felt funny, even odd enough to make people smile, when-ever they could hear or, less frequently, read the word.

But there is more. Recently one of the best experts of Latin, James Adams,has revised the entire issue concerning the replacement of the AcI in Petronius’snovel through an in-depth scrutiny of the scanty number of examples. Adams’sconclusions are novel and, as I wrote elsewhere, they deserve attention (Cuzzolin2013: 33, 35). According to James Adams, the special character of the vulgarismsin Petronius’s text does not consist of replacing the AcI through a subordinateintroduced by a conjunction; what is vulgar is precisely the choice of that particu-

Independently of the correctness of the suggestion presented here, it is also interesting andremarkable to observe that the form quianam, traditionally compared with σά μάν, also occurs inCn. Naevius, supposedly born in Campania, but definitely with a strong Campanian background.


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lar conjunction, i.e., quia instead of the allegedly expected quod. This vulgarism“might have been located, not in the complementing of verba dicendi et sentiendi by a subordinate clause, but in a perversion of the more ‘educated’ construc-

tion by the analogical replacement of the correct subordinator quod with quia”(Adams 2005: 197; my emphasis).Both Herman and Adams have thus added a couple of interesting features to

the discussion and they have convincingly argued that:. quia probably was a variant of quod;. quia used instead of quod represented a linguistic infraction.

These two conclusions are convincing but could also be in slight contradiction,unless we assume that:

. if quia was a variant of quod, it should belong to a low register, surely lowerthan quod (substandard, at least in origin?);

. if the choice of quia was really “perverse,” just to quote the adjective used byJ. Adams, then it was perverse to such an extent that not even analogy couldconceal the fact that it was incorrect and an actual infraction.

However, if both remarks are correct, and I think they are, and moreover, if thespeakers in Petronius’s novel break a linguistic rule, then this raises the question:

on what linguistic level should the linguistic infraction be located?Obviously, the sentence could not be ruled out as ungrammatical because

it was not; probably it could or should only sound infelicitous. But why? Again,surely not on diaphasic grounds: all the examples are colloquial and taken fromrather informal speeches; nor is it diastratic, all characters equally belong to thecrowd of common people, including the wealthy Trimalchio.

The only level on which this infraction is to be located, in my opinion, is thediatopic one: Echion is inevitably betrayed by some linguistic peculiarities of hisown idiolect he cannot dismiss: the usage of quia instead of quod is just one ofthem, as already noted in the literature (Boyce 1991; Dell’Era 1970).

Needless to say, it is difficult to correctly evaluate the fact that in these ex-amples the AcI is replaced by the complement subordinate. It is interesting, forinstance, to observe that quod occurs twice and quia also twice. However, it isprobably more relevant to stress the fact the examples where quia occurs areuttered by the same character, i.e., Echion centonarius.

Obviously, given Petronius’s versatility as a great artist, given that he loves toplay with different registers, mixing up the most trivial grammatical mistakes and

the most refined linguistic techniques, just to reproduce an artificial and kaleido-scopic world of parvenus, freedmen, slaves, prostitutes, procuresses, and pimps,one could also think that to employ quia instead of quod is the actual perversion


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in the text, the relevant mistake, and not that the AcI has not been used. This isAdams’s viewpoint, brilliant as usual, but only supplementary to what, at least inmy opinion, is the basic linguistic datum.

However, if one evaluates all scanty evidence brought to light so far, it is easyto see that all the data conspire to one direction: the crucial point is that the twoexamples where quia is employed are uttered by Echion centonarius and there-fore they are better explained as a typical feature of a native speaker of a Greekvariety rather than of Latin. In this case quia can be described as a Graecism.

In my opinion, the fact that the Megarian form σά exists tells us a parallelstory of a phenomenon under the surface.

In the literature on this topic there is an equivalence implicitly acceptedby scholars, i.e., that the conjunction quod would correspond, at least function-

ally, to Gr. ὡς whereas quia would correspond to ὅτι, functionally as well. I alsowonder whether some Greek could establish a metalinguistic correspondencebetween a form such as σά, if it survived and continued to exist, and quia.

It goes without saying that one should have more linguistic material at his/her own disposal to draw more reliable and firm conclusions. The number ofexamples is really limited and further investigations on the Greek–Latin bilin-gualism in Southern Italy would be necessary to corroborate or even disprove thesuggestion put forward here.

At this point one could wonder whether there is any advantage to claim thatquia is a Graecism. An observation is in order here. Concerning the birth anddevelopment of constructions such as dicere quod and dicere quia, in Cuzzolin(1994) it was claimed that both of them could not be described as Graecismbecause they used to occur also in texts and cultural environments where theinfluence of Greek was absent (this does not mean that the Greek culture wasunknown). In my opinion, it is easy to observe that especially quod developed thefunction of a subordination marker aer verbs of saying and thinking along com-pletely Latin paths. On this basis I was also against the overly simplistic idea thatquod and quia were the transplantation, as it were, of ὡς and ὅτι into Latin. Thiscorrespondence has some ground, but it is not the one that can account forboth the occurrence and the distribution of quod and quia in the first examplesattested and investigated in the present paper.

It was easy also to imagine that, given the contiguity of quia with quod, theformer expanded its functional load as to invade the domain of the latter. This isa likely scenario, but probably it has to be slightly corrected and improved; in anycase, if it happened, it took place gradually in time and therefore does not reflect

the original situation.It is likely that quia might indeed go back to a Greek origin. The difference

from what is usually claimed is that it was probably introduced into Latin by


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Greek speakers trying to speak Latin, if I have correctly evaluated the evi-dence provided by Petronius’s examples. Quia is not the consequence of the imi-tation of Greek literary models, otherwise it would have occurred in authors of

stylistically elevated prose, not in the speech of a poor guy in a very low socialcondition.The advantage of this perspective is that one does not have to do with a

mechanical imitation of the Greek style using quod and quia aer ὡς and ὅτι inliterary texts from a late period onward – in any case, later than the time whenthe phenomenon is attested. A late influence of Greek on Latin is almost natural(Calboli 2009). Here we have to do with a real situation of languages in contact –this implies the contact of different communities of speakers – instead of a ge-neric influence of Greek on Latin.

To sum up, there are good reasons to affirm that the replacement of the AcI by means of quod-constructions aer verbs of saying and thinking represents apurely Latin phenomenon, whereas quia-constructions represent a highly prob-able Graecism. Needless to say, this is the situation as we can envisage it at thebeginning of the process by which the AcI was replaced. What comes aer that,especially the variety of the so-called Christian Latin, belongs to another story,which has to be analyzed and interpreted according to other parameters.

Conclusion

With respect to the results I achieved in my dissertation about twenty yearsago, some conclusions can be now slightly revised. For instance, I had stronglysupported the claim that the replacement of the AcI by means of the quod-construction could not be treated as a Graecism, a position I still defend. The re-placement of the AcI was not triggered by the influence exerted on Latin by Greeksimply because this process starts in environments within Italy where Greek wasnot used. This development would have taken place in longer times but appar-ently it was already in progress in the second century BCE, as example (1) shows.What is probably disregarded is the fact that the original substitution would haveinvolved only the conjunction quod. If there was any influence of Greek on thisprocess, it certainly appears in the choice of quia, which at its origin could not beperceived as synonymous with quod.

The conclusion is that, with regards to their origins, one should keep apartthe quod-construction, which represents a development proper to Latin, from the

quia-construction, which is most likely due to the influence of Greek (it is likelythat this influence was exerted in particular by speakers of some special varietiesof Greek).


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References

Adams, James N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Adams, James N. 2005. The accusative + infinitive and dependent quod /quia-clauses. Theevidence of non-literary Latin and Petronius. In Sandor Kiss, Luca Mondin & Giampaolo

Salvi (eds.), Latin et langues romanes. Études de linguistique offertes à József Herman àl’occasion de son 80ème anniversaire, 195–206. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Bartoněk, Antonín. 2009. Dialekty klasické řečtiny . Brno: Masarykova univerzita.Bartoněk, Antonín. 2011. Chréstomatie starořeckých nářečních nápisů. Brno: Masarykova

univerzita.

Beekes, Robert. 2010. Etymological dictionary of Greek . Leiden & Boston: Brill.Boyce, Bret. 1991. The language of the freedmen in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis. Leiden: Brill.

Calboli, Gualtiero. 2009. Latin syntax and Greek. In Philip Baldi & Pierluigi Cuzzolin (eds.),New perspectives on historical Latin syntax . Vol. 1. Syntax of the sentence, 65–193.Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Colvin, Stephen. 1999. Dialect in Aristophanes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Cuzzolin, Pierluigi. 1994. Sull’origine della costruzione dicere quod. A spetti sintattici e

semantici . Firenze: La Nuova Italia.Cuzzolin, Pierluigi. 2013. The Latin construction dicere quod revisited. Greco-Latina Brunensia

18-1: 23–38.

Cuzzolin, Pierluigi & Piera Molinelli. 2013. Contatto linguistico e tipologie di mutamento:

Sintassi e pragmatica a confronto. In Luca Lorenzetti & Marco Mancini (eds.), Le lingue

del Mediterraneo antico. Culture, mutamenti, contatti , 95–121. Roma: Carocci.Dell’Era, Antonio. 1970. Problemi di lingua e stile in Petronio. Roma: Edizioni di Storia eLetteratura.

Fraser, Peter M. & Elaine Matthews (eds.). 1997. A lexicon of Greek personal names. Volume IIIA:The Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Greco, Paolo. 2012. La complementazione frasale nelle cronache latine dell’Italia centro-meridionale (secoli X–XII). Napoli: Liguori Editore.

Haudry, Jean. 1973. Parataxe, hypotaxe et corrélation dans la phrase latine. Bulletin de laSociété de Linguistique de Paris 68. 147–186.

Herman, József. 1963. La formation du système roman des conjonctions de subordination.

Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Herman, József. 2003. Notes syntaxiques sur la langue de Trimalcion et de ses invités. In József

Herman & Hannah Rosén (eds.), Petroniana. Gedenkschri für Hubert Petersmann,139–146. Heidelberg: Winter.

Hofmann, Johann Baptist & Anton Szantyr. 1971. Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik . München:Beck.

Lehmann, Christian. 1989. Latin subordination in typological perspective. In Gualtiero Calboli

(ed.), Subordination and other topics in Latin. Proceedings of the Third InternationalColloquium on Latin Linguistics. Bologna, 1–5 April 1985, 153–179. Amsterdam &Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Leumann, Manu. 1972. Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre. München: Beck.Mayen, Georg. 1889. De particulis QUOD QUIA QUONIAM QUOMODO UT pro accusativo cuminfinitivo post verba sentiendi ac declarandi positis. Kiliae: Ex officina H. Fiencke.


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Perrochat, Paul. 1932. Recherches sur la valeur et l’emploi de l’infinitif subordonnée en latin .Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Sihler, Andrew L. 1995. New comparative grammar of Greek and Latin. New York & Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Wackernagel, Jakob. 1912/1913. Lateinisch-Griechisch. Indogermanische Forschungen 31.251–271.

Wilson, Nigel G. (ed.) 1975. Prolegomena de comoedia. Scholia in Acharnenses Equites Nubes.Fasc. IB continens scholia in Aristophanis Acharnenses. Groningen: Bouma’s BoekhuisB.V.


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cuzzolin, some remarks on quia as a subordinator ater verbs of saying and thinking

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