Faxo in Plautus Revisited: Causativity vs. Speaker’s Stance

Abstract

The article concerns the semantic nuances of the verb faxo in the Plautus’ language. The vast majority of the occurrences demonstrate causative semantics, but there are a few cases where such a meaning can hardly be seen. De Melo singled out the two occurrences in which faxo can be treated as either an adverb similar to forsitan or a parenthetical expression with the meaning “I assume.” The author of the article has found some more examples of the non-causative use of faxo and tried to find out which of De Melo’s suggestions is preferable. On the grounds of the grammaticalization principles suggested by Hopper and Heine, there has been traced the stages of grammaticalization of faxo in the language of Roman comedy, with particular attention to the broader context. It is demonstrated that the causative meaning which transpires in many examples tends to emerge in the “bridging contexts” of grammaticalization, while the transition to the semantics under consideration occurs at the following stage, i.e. in the “switch context”. Having analyzed all the occurrences of faxo against the broader contexts and comparative data from other languages, the author concludes that the rare sigmatic future faxo had over time become a semi-grammaticalized marker of the speaker’s stance, which allowed both evidential (inferential) and modal-epistemic interpretation.