Latin verb placement: a study of non-V-final clauses in Cicero's 'Letters to Atticus'

The present thesis aims at the evaluation of Latin verb placement. Whereas most part of previous scientific literature views the markedly flexible word order of Latin either as a consequence of its rich morphology or as a strategy to directly encode pragmatic information into the sentence, syntactic properties have not been taken into account but by some recent works. In line with these innovative studies, this research particularly intends to define the factors that govern the structural position of the verb, both when it is located at the end of the clause - as is required by the neutral SOV pattern - and, more interestingly, when it surfaces toward the beginning, yielding marked V1 and V2 configurations. The analysis is conducted on a considerable corpus resulted from the firsthand reading of Cicero's 'Letters to Atticus', one of the few texts that best represent the spontaneous linguistic register of Classical Latin as spoken by upper classes. In addition and secondarily to the synchronic investigation, we also pursue the tentative comparison with the rise of the typically V2 grammars of Germanic and Medieval Romance languages.