Any verb form of Classical Latin can be assigned to one of the three stems: the infectum-stem, the perfectum-stem, or the supine-stem. In Archaic Latin, on the other hand, there are also verb forms which do not belong to these stems, the so-called extra-paradigmatic forms. Such forms are at the heart of Wolfgang de Melo's study, which asks what they mean, how they are used, and what they go back to. Since their meaning is best examined by contrasting them with the regular forms, the first part of the book discusses selected problems of the regular verbal system of Archaic Latin. In the second part, the meaning of the extra-paradigmatic forms is established by contrasting them with the regular ones. The third part goes beyond Archaic Latin, not only examining the origins of the extra-paradigmatic forms, but outlining their survival after the archaic period. The meaning and use of the forms in Archaic Latin provides the basis for both types of diachronic study.
This is the first comprehensive treatment of Latin extra-paradigmatic verb forms, that is, verb forms which cannot easily be assigned to any particular tense in the Latin verbal system. In order to see what functions such forms fulfil, one has to compare their usage to that of the regular verb forms. In Part 1, Wolfgang de Melo outlines the usage of regular verb forms, which, surprisingly, has not always been described adequately in the standard grammars. In Part 2, the central part of the book, he compares the usage of the extra-paradigmatic verb forms to that of the regular ones, restricting himself to Archaic Latin (roughly before 100 BC); here he makes many new and unexpected discoveries. In Part 3, de Melo shows how synchronic usage can help us to reconstruct earlier stages of the language which are not attested; he also points out that, while most of the extra-paradigmatic forms die out after 100 BC, some survive - and that such survival is by no means a matter of chance.
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