Events

Fokelien Kootstra (UGent): "I used to think your administration was better and more successful"; Case marking and scribal practice in the early Arabic documentary papyri (7th-9th century AD)".

Abstract: here

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Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.

The presentation explores the syntactic development of the ablative gerund in Late Latin. Adopting a functional-typological perspective, it investigates the construction’s degree of nominality and sententiality. The analysis is based on a corpus of 12 texts dating from the 3rd to the 6th century AD and focuses on two main issues: the relationship between prepositional and non-prepositional ablative gerunds in Late Latin, and the level of internal syntactic complexity of the non-prepositional ablative gerunds. The comparison between prepositional and non-prepositional ablative gerunds offers evidence for a low degree of nominality of the ablative gerund in Late Latin. At the same time, the analysis of internal syntactic complexity shows a high level of sententiality. Although the ongoing development is evident, the presence of prepositional ablative gerunds, still displaying a noun-like behavior, indicates that the syntactic development is still in progress and not yet concluded.