Re-verbs in Late Antiquity

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In this paper I examine the productivity of different meanings of re- in different periods. Therefore I distinguish five basic uses of re-: ‘backwards, away, not forwards’, ‘back to the starting point’, iterative, inversive and countermove. My corpus consists of the printed re-entries from the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, from reaccipio to resilio. I investigate firstly which re-meanings are still productive in Late Latin, and, secondly, which re-verbs live on in Romance languages. All uses of re- appear to be still productive in the Late Period, but in contrast to earlier Latin it is the iterative use that predominates in new formations. Several re-verbs live on in Romance languages, mainly those attested before the second century ce. Re-verbs formed after this time are mostly short-lived.