A distributional analysis of vowel quantity in a corpus of Latin texts

Abstract The paper examines the relationship between vowel quantity, syllable structure and lexical stress in Latin through a quantitative analysis carried out on a corpus of literary texts taken from Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares and Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis. Each word of the corpus was split into syllables and phonemes. Then, the corpus was annotated with phonological and prosodic information pertaining to vowel length, syllable structure, stress and word length. Finally, the data collected were analyzed at different levels. The results are discussed in light of the findings of a previous analysis carried out on dictionary entries, confirming a close correlation between syllable structure and lexical stress, since the great majority of stressed syllables are heavy both in the literary corpus and in the dictionary. Moreover, long vowels are more frequently found in open and stressed syllables, particularly in paroxytones. The data suggest that the process leading to the loss of vowel quantity was already active (at least in some strata of Roman society) in the Latin of the Classical age, since a prosodic template similar to that occurring in many Romance developments emerges even in literary Latin texts.