Observations regarding finite and participial relative clauses in Latin and Ancient Greek

In its conventional definition, heavily influenced by the legacy of Greek and Latin grammars, the relative clause (RC) is a subordinate clause which is introduced by a relative pronoun, comprises a finite verb form, and whose function is to modify a noun designated as the antecedent. However, since Lehmann’s pioneering study (1984), these characteristics have been repeatedly contested. Typologists and functionalists have developed a more precise definition of relativisation strategies: neither the presence of the relative pronoun (Comrie, 1989, pp. 138–164) nor that of a finite verb form (Cristofaro, 2003, pp. 53–60) is sufficient to describe all RCs. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the participle, when it modifies a noun, can be regarded as a RC in its own right (Sleeman, 2017; Shagal, 2019). These typological advances have had relatively little impact on historical linguistics. For instance, Ramos Guerreira (2009) and Pinkster (2021) both leave the issue of competition between finite and participial RCs in Latin unaddressed, while Burkard et al. (2020, p.713) briefly observe that, in this language, “das rein attributive Partizip ersetzt einen attributiven Relativsatz”. A notable exception is Pompei (2011, pp. 489–492), in which the topic is explored in some depth, albeit without the support of a systematic corpus study. Regarding Ancient Greek, the status quaestionis is broadly similar: whilst the finite RCs received extensive attention, as evidenced by Probert’s work (2015), the relationship between these RCs and participial ones remains an area of ongoing research. On the basis of an already compiled corpus of works by Plautus, Caesar, Herodotus and Aeschylus, I propose to examine a number of stylistic, semantic and syntactic criteria in order to understand the distribution between finite and participial RCs in Latin and in Greek. In such a study, the following questions arise naturally:

• the relation between balanced (finite) and deranked (non‐finite) verb forms (Stassen, 1985, pp. 76–83) and the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977; Comrie & Keenan, 1979);
• the influence of the textual genre;
• the type of discourse unit in which the relative pronoun – or pivot (de Vries, 2002) – is located;
• the syntactic weight of these RCs and their word order.

Such an analysis will provide a clearer understanding of the differences between the two types of RCs in Latin and in Greek, while contextualising both languages in a more recent framework that takes typological advances into account.