63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

168 j. g. f. powell
refined, since it seems to me to postulate too sharp a dichotomy between
‘artistic’ prose on the one hand and ‘ordinary speech’ on the other. Artistic
composition may sometimes reflect features of ordinary speech better
than inartistic composition does; compare the last letter you received from
your solicitor or bank manager with the dialogue in a first-class novel. The
absence or rarity of some kinds of hyperbaton in some Latin texts in the
‘lower’ literary genres, noted by Adams, may not after all indicate that it
is an artificial literary feature. Nor should we conflate two different oppositions:
that between oral and written on the one hand, and that between
formal and informal (or high and low) on the other. It is possible that
a feature may be characteristically oral, without being necessarily ‘colloquial’
in the accepted sense. Certainly in English there exist features (some
reducible to writing, others of course not) that are characteristic of formal
oral performance, but which would not be found often in colloquial
speech: a straightforward example is the up-and-down intonation used by
English newsreaders and reporters, which would hardly pass muster in
most informal conversational contexts. I shall suggest in due course that
one kind of hyperbaton may be a candidate for inclusion in this category.
2types
Before we can venture a better answer to the question of the distribution
of hyperbaton among the registers of Republican literary Latin, we need to
have a secure classification of the different types of hyperbaton, or, more
precisely, of the different phenomena that may be classified under that
heading. There are naturally a number of criteria that can be used, the
most obvious being the nature of the separated words (adjective and noun,
for example), the nature of the intervening material (particle, pronoun,
verb, etc.), and the distance of separation. The challenge is to find the
significant differentiating features.
I take it as generally agreed that when a noun phrase 17 is split by words
that do not form part of the phrase, we have an instance of hyperbaton.
Viewed in traditional grammatical terms, the syntactic role of the
noun phrase is not affected by the intervening word or words: there is no
difference from a syntactical point of view, for example, between bonos
consules habemus and bonos habemus consules, since both the continuous
17 In conventional linguistic terminology a noun plus its modifiers (e.g. adjectives, demonstratives,
possessive genitives) is called a ‘noun phrase’. The noun is the ‘head’ of the noun phrase; modifiers
may be further qualified by ‘sub-modifiers’.