Studies in the prosody of Plautine Latin

This thesis investigates selected metrical and linguistic phenomena in Plautus's comedies to reconstruct aspects of the prosody of Plautine Latin. Topics covered include the law of the split resolution, Meyers and Luchs's Laws, the loci Jacobsohniani, and iambic shortening; additionally, two topics that had never received detailed linguistic analysis, enjambement and aphaeresis of esse, are treated as well. Claims are made about resyllabification, prosodic domain construction, and effects of the interaction of phonology and syntax.;Approaches to uncovering the linguistic basis of Plautine versification in the past have not distinguished between entities loosely termed "words," "tight groups," and the like. In the present work, a distinction is drawn between phonological words (single accentual unities under the Latin penultimate stress rule) and clitic groups (combinations of clitics and fully-stressed lexemes) which did not behave as single accentual unities. The phenomena listed above are all investigated with an eye to these distinctions.;It is claimed that pater meus and similar diiambic phrases violated Luchs's Law because, contrary to assumptions in the literature, the possessive was not enclitic to the noun, and hence the phrase was not prosodically equivalent to a diiambic quadrisyllable. Evidence is marshalled from this phrase and from phrases like quam ob rem that syntactic movement prevented fronted elements from entering into a clitic group with a following word. Syntactic movement also blocked the cliticization of the verb esse (aphaeresis): aphaeresis was free at right edges of phrases and after bare nouns, but not after nouns that had been distracted from their modifiers.;Coda-to-onset resyllabification is argued to have occurred within clitic groups, based on the law of the split anapest and iambic shortening across word-groups. Word-internal resyllabification of clusters is claimed to be the source of scansions like uenust atem; resyllabification was conditioned by stress-assignment. Iambic shortening itself is interpreted to be a rule sensitive only to prosodic and not syntactic context: the iambic sequence had to belong to a closely-cohering unstressed sequence to feed the rule, and theories based on a clash of stress and quantity are rejected.*;*Originally published in DAI Vol. 57, No. 5. Reprinted here with corrected author name.