Verg. Aen. 9. 427: A linguist’s perspective

Authors

  • Elena V. Zheltova St. Petersburg State University, 7–9, Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9585-7952

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu20.2023.112

Abstract

This article offers a linguistic commentary on the verse Verg. Aen. 9. 427 me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, in which the personal pronoun in the accusative needs interpretation. Since the time of Servius and Donatus, the opinions of commentators have been divided. Servius and his followers believe that the pronoun in the accusative is a direct complement that depends on an implied (omitted) verb like interficite, occidite, or petite, and consider this place as a rhetorical figure of aposiopesis. Donatus, on the other hand, argues that the accusative me, me is independent, while discontinuous intonation with which the whole verse must be uttered emphasizes the extreme degree of despair of Nisus, who cannot prevent the death of his beloved friend Euryalus. A review of the commentaries on the Aeneid shows that there are slightly more supporters of Donatus’ hypothesis than that of Servius’, but all of their reasoning is intuitive and does not explain why it is the syntactically independent accusative that gives the agitated sounding to Nisus’ last words. The author of the article applies the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of this place, analyzing similar examples of “non-syntactic” use of the accusative and considering both traditional and modern views on this phenomenon. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the verse under consideration corresponds to what in modern linguistics is called “cleft construction”. Such constructions exist in different languages and serve to express the focus of contrast. At the end of the study, the author attempts to answer the question of why Latin employs the accusative as a tool to express intense emotions.

Keywords:

Virgil, Aeneid, Latin, pragmatics, accusative, contrastive focus, cleft constructions

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Published

2023-08-04

How to Cite

Zheltova, E. V. . (2023). Verg. Aen. 9. 427: A linguist’s perspective. Philologia Classica, 18(1), 139–148. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu20.2023.112

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2023)

Section

Miscellanea

License

Articles of "Philologia Classica" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.