The dico form: An autonymous marker

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we review a specific use of the dico form: its use as autonymous marker. From a corpus of Latin texts (from the archaic period to the Flavian Age), we try to determine if this use is correlated to specific linguistic configurations. After reminding that the dico form could be used in the self-quotation with different values (over-enunciative and autonymous) often connected with the morphosyntactic form of the quoted speech, we study more specifically the linguistic conditions of emergence of the dico form as autonymous marker and review different criteria: contextual, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. In the last part of this paper, we propose to focus our attention on two particularly relevant phenomena: the autodiaphonic repetitions and the case particularities of the word used in autonymy with dico.