Major
Latin
Anticipated Graduation Year
2021
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Latin deponent verbs, which behave like the active voice yet mostly use the endings associated with the passive, are a persistent curiosity in the study of grammatical voice. This project seeks to problematize the notions of standard active and passive voices, and reassess the relationship between morphology and voice. By comparing common deponents with non-deponent synonyms and near-synonyms, this project attempts to identify what precisely distinguishes deponent verbs. Though it is not conclusive on that question, findings indicate that deponents are not true actives or passives, and that transitive and intransitive deponents should be considered two separate phenomena.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Jacqueline Long
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
What Makes Deponents Different? Problems in Latin deponency, and a new method for its study
Latin deponent verbs, which behave like the active voice yet mostly use the endings associated with the passive, are a persistent curiosity in the study of grammatical voice. This project seeks to problematize the notions of standard active and passive voices, and reassess the relationship between morphology and voice. By comparing common deponents with non-deponent synonyms and near-synonyms, this project attempts to identify what precisely distinguishes deponent verbs. Though it is not conclusive on that question, findings indicate that deponents are not true actives or passives, and that transitive and intransitive deponents should be considered two separate phenomena.
Comments
Please reach out to me at clewandowski1@luc.edu or carl.lewandowski@gmail.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss this topic further!