Word-Order Transference between Latin and Greek: The Relative Position of the Accusative Direct Object and the Governing Verb in Cassius Dio and Other Greek and Roman Prose Authors

Abstract

THROUGH statistical analysis of a great number of sentences, we confirm one major difference between Latin and Greek word order, and we explore the ramifications of this observation for some possible cases of word-order transference between Latin and Greek. The difference to which we refer concerns the positioning of the accusative direct object before or after the verb governing it. That there is a significant difference in the Greek and Latin distributions will come as no surprise to Classical linguists: it has long been observed that Latin has a greater tendency to place the verb at the end of the clause than does Greek.' From this fact alone one might predict that the direct object in Latin is more likely to precede than to follow the verb on which it depends than is the case in Greek-although, logically, this need not be the case. In our study we tested this prediction empirically by tabulating the direct object distributions in sixty passages written by fifteen Latin and ten Greek prose authors. Each passage was randomly selected in the text of an author. We analyzed the first one hundred direct objects in the accusative