Oratio Obliqua. Strategies of Reported Speech in Ancient Languages

Under the name oratio obliqua historical and descriptive grammars of Latin traditionally refer to strategies of reported speech typical of this language. However reported speech is universally known and each language applies different strategies depending on message content and its purposes, attitudes of the speaker, contexts and text genres. Among the world's languages Latin features reported speech by means of very distinct morpho-syntactic structures, that deserve special attention in the perspectives of both text interpretation and synchronic and diachronic variation of linguistic patterns in relation to critical verbal categories such as tempus and modus. Particularly in Latin, reported speech is relevant also to legal texts known through both literary and epigraphic sources, so that their strategies are of special interest from the perspective of the rise and development of Roman law and legal style as well. This volume results from a workshop devoted to this topic, that was held on the occasion of the XVIIth Conference of Latin Linguistics (Rome, 2013 20th-25th May). For this reason most of the contributions to this volume focus on different aspects of reported speech in Latin in its evolution up until late antiquity. Nevertheless insights into other languages stimulate and help to enlarge the perspective. (From Foreword)



Contents: Foreword. Gualtiero Calboli, Direct and indirect style and connected rules; Michèle Fruyt, Les relations entre le réfléchi indirect se et ipse en latin; Marie-Dominique Joffre, La représentation de l'interlocuteur dans le discours rapporté: la répartition is / ipse; Laurent Moonens, L'expression des possibles en oratio obliqua: les traces d'un "argument d'autorité"?; Anna Orlandini, Paolo Poccetti, Structures pseudo-subordonnées en oratio obliqua; Colette Bodelot, Particularités du discours indirect chez Frédégaire; Lyliane Sznajder, Quelques réflexions sur des discours hybrides du latin biblique: oratio obliqua ou oratio recta?; Hannah Rosén, Pathways of complementing verba dicendi and other content-reporting verbs: Irish and Latin; Donna Shalev, Observations on the application and notion of oratio obliqua in literary classical Greek, with special reference to drama and Plato; Ilaria Liberati, Per la storia del termine obliquo nella sua accezione metalinguistica: tra tradizione grammaticale antica e uso moderno.