63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

84 wolfgang david cirilo de melo
Example (21) shows nominalised suum, example 22 shows suam modifying
rem. In each case the form is non-reflexive, the subject being the first
person. And in each case we find sibi instead of ei, again in non-reflexive
function. Since non-reflexive sibi does not normally occur elsewhere, it is
an oddity in the system, and that is why it was reanalysed as a particle
strengthening suus. This derivation differs from the traditional ones in that
it has non-reflexive, emphatic suus and reflexivity-attracted sibi as its basis.
This approach has two advantages: first, it starts with strings in which the
possessive is emphatic, as it is in the reanalysed sequence suus sibi. Not
all the strings proposed in earlier derivations necessarily contain emphatic
possessives; for instance, there is no reason why meas in example (15)should
be contrastive. Second, if my explanation is correct, it gives us a rationale
for the absence of meus mihi ‘my own’ and tuus tibi ‘your own’: meam
mihi rem salvam sistet ‘he’ll give me my possessions back safe and sound’
contains nothing unusual, nothing that is against the system, nothing that
lends itself to reanalysis.
If examples like the ones I have just given are the diachronic basis for
the type suus sibi, example (23) reflects a type that is older than example
(24):
(23) ut quisque acciderat, eum necabam ilico
per cerebrum pinna sua sibi quasi turturem. (Pl. Poen. 486–7)
Whenever one of them had fallen down, I killed him on the spot with
his own feather through his brain, like a turtledove.
(24) earum hic adulescens alteram ecflictim perit,
suam sibi cognatam, imprudens, neque scit quae siet. (Pl. Poen. 96–7)
This young man is madly in love with one of the two, his own relative,
without having a clue, and he doesn’t know who she is.
Example (23) represents the older type because sua sibi does not refer back
to the subject, whereas suam sibi in example (24) does. Note that the
reanalysis of sibi as a strengthening particle is complete since in example
(23) it comes a few words after the non-reflexive eum.
Theregisterofthetypesuus sibi is generally said to be colloquial (Lindsay
1907: 9; Norberg 1944: 65). But is it really? When we examine the register
of lexemes or constructions, we typically check their distribution patterns
over the various literary genres. For early Latin suus sibi this is difficult. In
the whole of Plautus there are only twelve tokens. Outside Plautus, there