[240] Caesar, on the other hand, seems to prefer hostium castra (69% of examples). The fact that war was waged on both land and sea is a weak focus placed in penultimate position; but the new and surprising information is that the number of Roman legions was no fewer than 23, and this comes at the beginning of the sentence before the topic: In the following sentence with antithesis, two topics, "the land journey" and "the journey by sea", are contrasted. However, the opposite order (e.g. ad ea below) and has precedence over the discourse topic (Caesar below):[9], A topic will often take precedence over a conjunction, and the following word order where the topic (in this case the grammatical subject) precedes cum "when" is fairly common:[11], Not every sentence has a topic, but some present information which is entirely new. Commands come in two flavors, but both behave similarly on a grammatical level: A command is the main verb of its sentence and makes it an imperative sentence (one of the four base types of sentences). ), "Some Phonetic Aspects of Word Order Patterns in Latin", "How Far Does the Word-Order in Latin Indicate the Proper Emphasis? Livy uses this antique word order at a dramatic moment in his history when he reports the words of the magistrate announcing the news of the disaster at the battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 BC: Another adjective which changes over time is omnis "all". In English (and in Latin), the positive imperative is a command. The verbs also come initially in sentences like the one below, in which there is a double antithesis. Marouzeau (1938), p. 82, quoted in Panhuis (1982), p. 27. However, this is less than with other verbs, for which the figure is 55%–70%. [260], There are certain words that are enclitic, that is to say, they always follow a stronger word. Postponement, placing of words in unexpected positions, and juxtaposition were ways Romans achieved emphasis in their sentences, according to an excellent, public domain online Latin grammar, A Latin Grammar, by William Gardner Hale and Carl Darling Buck. A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words, e.g. Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius".

Latin word order is relatively free. [162], In Cato, the adjective magnus "big" follows its noun in 7 out of 9 examples, e.g.

[191] When a possessive follows the noun it is unemphatic:[192]. Syntactic approaches traditionally analyse a sentence into Subject and Predicate, but a pragmatic analysis considers a sentence from the point of view of Topic and Focus (or Theme and Rheme, as Panhuis (1982) puts it). Cardinal numbers tend to come before the noun in Cicero (90% of examples), but in Caesar only 54% come before the noun. Hyperbaton is also possible when the adjective follows the noun. [220], It is been noted that in various languages when more than one adjective precedes a noun, they tend to come in a particular order. erat "there was") are also usually sentence-initial:[90]. For example, the adjective superior in its literal sense of "higher" (e.g.

The new information, or focus, is the person who followed and the number of ships he brought: A very frequent place for the focus, however, is in penultimate position, just before the verb or another element. In another passage from the same work, Cicero criticises a sentence from the orator Crassus on the grounds that it sounds like a line of iambic poetry. Thus mea fāma, with the possessive before the noun, means not "my fame" but "my own fame"; nāvēs sunt combustae quīnque, with the number at the end of the sentence and separated from its noun, doesn't just mean "five ships were burnt" but "no fewer than five ships were burnt". The most frequent position for pronominal adjectives is before the noun. difficile est "it is difficult"), rather than as an auxiliary to another verb (e.g. An example of the typical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order in Caesar is: A dependent infinitive, such as interficī "to be killed" below, also in Caesar usually precedes its verb:[48], However, in other genres of Latin, especially more colloquial types such as the comic dialogues of Plautus, Cicero's letters, or Petronius's satiric novel, the final position for the verb is much less common. [153] Where the adjective is more salient or important than the noun, as "Appian" in "Appian Way" (via Appia), it also tends to follow it. (Their statistics omit some examples, however.

A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words, e.g. [174] In the following example, "these particular" floods are contrasted with some earlier ones which lasted a shorter time: Sometimes they are merely brought to the front to emphasise them. Don't build the aqueduct there, soldiers!

[39], The 1st-century A.D. teacher of oratory, Quintilian, remarks that hyperbaton (switching words round) is often used to make a sentence more euphonious.

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