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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 550

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The Change in Latin’s Dative

Authors: de Castro, Renata
Submitted by: de Castro, Renata (Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil)

Regarding the Latin case system, it may seem at first that the functions are well defined by their cases, or the cases by their functions. However, in the history of Latin there is a case of particular complexity by its construction diversity: the dative. This diversity occurs due to the dative’s presence in the sentence, which causes an apparent lack of structural semantic unity. It is apparent, because it is possible to think about this case’s fluidity from its variations. It is usually attributed to the Vulgar Latin (V.L.) the responsibility for the transformations suffered by Latin, mainly the reduction of the inflectional name system. However, the Classical Latin (C.L.) was a simplification of the Indo-European system of cases. Nonetheless, one cannot deny that the V.L. accelerated the reduction process, by optimizing a former tendency. During the Roman domination, bilingualism was important to transformations, and also was the distance between a small elite, which spoke a Latin closer to the C.L., and the majority of the population. Clearly, not only external sociolinguistic factors determined the dative’s variation, but also did the internal factors inherent to the structure of Latin. One might think that the cause of the shift in the dative’s functions was already in the Latin system. In its structure, the variation would be latent, ready to be triggered, arisen, and turned into an effective change. Some phonetic modifications deriving from the desinential similarity were registered, but they are not the only ones responsible for the breakdown of the system of cases; probably, the distinct desinences fell into disuse due to functional factors. The progressive change in the phonetic system helped the suppression of formal differences in certain cases. However, this phonetic change also protected, as far as it could, the functional limit of the cases that became interchangeable, following a tendency that emerged from its origins, with similarities among the functions of certain cases, such as the dative, genitive, and ablative. Thus, viewing the language as a systemic structure allows us to think that all linguistic variations are already internally programmed. Therefore, the possibilities of differentiation would be suspended until they could be effective. The latent variations could be accomplished through elements external to the language, which could cause pressure. That is, the variation would already be part of the system – this is invariable in its principles, which are not inherent to it – and extralinguistic elements would create the necessary circumstances, so a variation could be started. Once triggered, and being social, the language would assume some variations and would turn them into a change. As Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (2006) discussed the interaction of intraliguistic and extralinguistic factors in the process of linguistic variation, this research intends not only to analyze how the dative variation from the two coexisting Latin varieties happened – classical and vulgar –, but also to analyze the structural rearrangement of this case based on Chomsky’s theory. For this purpose, the parametric sociolinguistics must provide the necessary theoretical apparatus.