Latin Proclitics I

Abstract

Chapter 4 considers the late antique evidence for a widespread doctrine of the Latin grammatical tradition: that prepositions, relative pronoun forms, and certain other words have an acute accent on their final syllables, in apparent violation of the usual principles of Latin accentuation. The doctrine belongs to a way of talking about the accentual behaviour of proclitic words: words that are normally pronounced without an accent and form a prosodic unit with what follows. An abstract acute accent is assigned to the final syllable so that this can undergo a rule ‘lulling’ an acute on a final syllable into a grave (non-accent) in connected speech. The lulling rule is borrowed from descriptions of Greek, but we see various efforts to adjust its details so as to avoid results that are not intended for Latin. We also see other ways of saying that proclitic words are normally pronounced without an accent.