2. Remarks on the type faxō/faxim

Abstract

This paper deals with the origin of one of the more controversial morphological structures of Archaic Latin verb, the so called "fax-ō/-īm type". The topic has been addressed since the very beginning of Indo-European studies, and it still represents a puzzling problem. In recent years, though, recent studies like those by W.D. De Melo offered new insights on the whole matter, specifically on the productivity of faxō/im forms along the entire Latinity; it seems possible now to reconsider some hypothesis about the origin and the distribution of these forms. The paper is organised as follows: in the second paragraph I will put some methodological claims forward; then (§ 3), the main morphological proposals will be mentioned; § 4 will be dedicated to the syntactic properties of faxō/im type, while in § 5 I outline my conclusive hypothesis. It will be shown that the basic syntactic environment where the type is observed are the prescriptive formulas of the juridical language, and this leads to hypothesise that the morphological clusters -e/o~ī-was a Latin innovation for licensing modal features bounded with anteriority. 2. METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AND CONSISTENCY Whoever wants to study the faxō/im type will easily notice that even Leumann (1977) relegates it in the very final part of his Grammar, and that most scholar call these forms "extraparadigmatic": the formal oddity was considered as a direct consequence of their archaic nature. In fact, some might say that "archaic" does not seem to be anything more than a label, or, in other words, that to ascribe the faxō/im type to the Archaic Latin is not an explanans, rather another explanandum. The point is that Archaic Latin is a sort of Restsprache, in which different kinds of Latin seems to cohabit, under which we keep different chronological stages, different phases of the Roman history, different places, and furthermore, different textual genres. That should have some consequences, because Restsprachen do not allow grammatical formalism at the same way 'natural' languages do, and consequently much more weight has to be acknowledged to any single text one considers 1 ; then, once we look to Archaic Latin as to an intrinsically composite language, the explanation of the origin and the function of sigmatic subjunctives and futures seems much more 1 Cf. Prosdocimi (2004). complex. Under this light, the massive variability in any field of "Archaic Latin" morphology needs to be explored keeping in mind that any eventual innovation may have its own independent linguistic and historical reasons. This means (§5) that the origin of sigmatic modal forms has not to do only with Indo-European reconstruction, but also with internal processes of Latin morphosyntax. In detail, I will show that a careful insight into faxō/im's distribution is necessary for the analysis, and, moreover, that the crucial step will be to understand under which textual conditions the origin of such forms took place. The type faxō/im is far widespread across different chronological stages within Archaic La...

Faxo in Plautus Revisited: Causativity vs. Speaker’s Stance

“…For more detail on the origin and functioning of the sigmatic future in Latin, see(De Melo 2002, 87-88; 2008, 17-188;Bertocci 2017). …”