Les constructions infinitives selon la conception de Gualtiero Calboli

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Among the numerous problems that occupied Gualtiero Calboli during his scientific career, the nominal forms of the Latin verb and, above all, the constructions involving an infinitive have a salient place. In his different studies, he often returned to the declarative infinitive clause, commonly named ‘accusatiuus cum infinitiuo’, which he investigated from both the synchronic and the diachronic points of view. The most important question here is naturally the extension process of the construction: in the beginning, the accusative has a relation with a transitive verb (uideo eum uenire), but later the construction can be found also with impersonal forms (constat te bonum esse) and with passive verbs (dicitur amicum uenire – here in coexistence with the ‘nominatiuus cum infinitiuo’). Professor Calboli emphasizes the functioning of a complex hierarchy in Latin literary prose, in accordance with the opinion of Meillet, who spoke of a system of subordination ‘strongly articulated’ in Latin. Calboli’s studies also examine the competition between the infinitive and the clauses introduced by the conjunctions quod / quia; he shows that the latter type of clause was not infrequent in the classical period of Latin. We thus obtain an instructive panorama of different solutions in an interesting domain of syntactic synonymy.