Clausal word order in the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. An emerging V2 grammar?

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Clausal word order in the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. An emerging V2 grammar?, Page 1 of 1

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In the transition from Latin to Romance, there is a shift to a V2 grammar as attested in old Romance varieties, which was preceded by a V1 stage. The present paper aims to investigate the word order of the early third-century text Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis from the perspective of this change, since it shows already many V1 orders. The question thus arises as to whether these cases of V1 can be interpreted as an initial stage of the development of the V2 word order (i.e. generalisation of verb movement to C) or whether these V1 orders still only occur in the pragmatic contexts identified for classical Latin. It is shown that both V1 and V2 orders are very frequent especially in main clauses and that it is not limited to the pragmatic contexts in which it was allowed in Classical Latin. Finally, different tendencies can be distinguished for the redactor’s Latin compared to the narratives by Perpetua and Saturus.