BMCR 2009.08.41: Traill on Fortson, Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and Diachronic Studies. Sozomena / Studies in the Recovery of Ancient Texts; 3

Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and
Diachronic Studies. Sozomena / Studies in the Recovery of Ancient
Texts; 3.  Berlin/New York:  Walter de Gruyter, 2008.  Pp. 250.  ISBN
9783110205930.  $98.00.

Reviewed by Ariana Traill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
([email protected])
Word count:  3517 words
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[Disclaimer: the reviewer knew the author slightly in graduate school.]

[Table of Contents is listed at the end of the review.]

This is a specialized monograph, primarily of interest to scholars of
Plautine metrics but valuable to anyone interested in archaic Latin.
The central argument is that apparent metrical anomalies, including
departures from Greek practice, are not simply poetic license but
reflect the actual speech of Plautus' day; that is, "prosody" in a
linguistic sense ("the phonological organization of natural speech," p.
4 n. 11) can explain such phenomena as violations of metrical laws,
when e is aphaeretized in est, or how and when words underwent iambic
shortening.

The book, a revised Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard, 1996), is organized by
topic. After preliminary remarks and an overview of the basics of
Plautine scansion, there are chapters on violations of Luchs', Meyer's
and Jacobsohn's laws, enjambement, aphaeresis, iambic shortening, and a
conclusion applying the book's findings toward a reconstruction of
Plautine speech. The findings of each chapter are very helpfully
summarized in a separate section at the end. The study is, not
unreasonably, limited to the iambo-trochaic sections in the Varronian
canon (there is the odd example of a rare phenomenon in a canticum, but
no fragments or poets other than Plautus) and relies on earlier
scholarship (e.g., Ceccarelli, Drexler[[1]]) for some of the data
collection. The focus is on the synchronic picture. "Diachronic" in the
title alludes to occasional references to later authors such as Vergil
or earlier/later developments in the Latin language (from
Proto-Indo-european to the romance languages), but this is not a
diachronic study like Soubiran (1988), for example, who traces
iambo-trochaics from Euripides to the Pervigilium Veneris[[2]]).
Fortson is particularly interested in phonology-syntax interface: the
effects of syntactic processes on phonology, particularly when these
leave traces in the metrics (e.g., clitic groups filling slots normally
reserved for single words).

Written by an indo-europeanist with impeccable credentials in both
linguistics and classics, this is a genuinely interdisciplinary study.
It draws on textual criticism and classical philology as comfortably as
on X-bar theory and pragmatics, approaching Plautus with new questions
(e.g., what linguistic information may be embedded in loci
Jacobsohniani) and shedding new light on old ones (e.g., using
linguistic arguments to defend manuscript readings that violate
metrical laws). This very strength may be a stumbling block for
readers. The book assumes linguistic background not universal among
classicists (sandhi rules, wh-movement, syntax trees, concepts from
pragmatics such as topic and focus, and specialized vocabulary, such as
rheme, adjunct, and matrix verb). It is influenced by, and frequently
cites, Devine and Stephens (1994)[[3]]. It also requires more metrical
knowledge than is provided in the overview chapter. For example, there
is no mention of prosodic hiatus, apocope of final -s, or synizesis,
but readers need to know these to scan Men. 550 (p. 38), Bac. 220
(ibid.), and Mil.  1104 (p. 39), respectively. They need to know that
the e in Philippeo (Bac. 200) must be short and the second syllable
light (only the latter is mentioned, and not until p. 208 n.   80) and
that a resolved "C" violates Meyer's law in the same way as a single
heavy "C" (this is not spelled out in the introduction but appears in
the very first example cited, Aul. 55, p. 55). Boldface is used to
single out the phenomenon in question in each cited line, but lines are
not usually scanned and the meter is not identified. A few "ia6's" and
"tr7's" would have been helpful for non-specialists, who may be
understandably confused. (To take one example: Meyer's and Luchs's Laws
are introduced as applying to senarii and septenarii (p. 34), but the
first example cited under "Violations" (p. 37) is an octonarius.) None
of this will pose a problem to specialists, but it does limit the
audience. The author concedes at the start that "the study of ancient
metrics is an inordinately complicated affair" (p. 3), and it seems
only fair to note the topic is not simplified by the application of
linguistics. The Latin is translated where the argument requires
understanding the meaning of a citation, but in general it is assumed
the reader will be able to recognize parts of speech and phrase
structure without assistance, while the frequent arguments about
prosodic domain presume some familiarity with vocabulary (e.g., knowing
whether a word is a function word or a lexical one).

It is impossible to do justice to the kind of argument this book makes
in summary form. The phenomena under scrutiny are shown, roughly
speaking, to reflect properties of Latin prosodic organization. Both
expertise and long, patient care went into constructing the book's
carefully considered, nuanced and detailed arguments. What follows is a
brief summary of the conclusions on enjambement, aphaeresis, and iambic
shortening, followed by a more detailed discussion of the analysis of
violations of Meyer's law. Concerning enjambement, Fortson argues that
there are indeed restrictions which reflect Latin prosody: prepositions
and their objects are never split by line breaks, non/nec are never
line-final except when they occur at the end of a phrase, and it is
probable that conjunctions, especially monosyllabic ones, are
"proclitic or prosodically subordinate" (pp. 132-3). Aphaeresis of est
is constrained by syntax, but lack of aphaeresis is not; it is allowed
"at the right edge of a noun or adjective phrase, between a noun or
adjective and a following adjunct or appositive", (p. 174), after at
least one adverb (intus), and after the pronoun ipsus and the
quantifiers nullus and totus (pp.157-60). Iambic shortening (brevis
brevians, abbr. BB) is "an optional phonological rule that affected
only words or sequences of syllables in acoustic dips"; it is not
caused by underlying word accent and does not require close syntactic
connection with what follows (but its rarity before caesurae or
diaereses "suggests that any prosodic break following ... would have
had to be quite weak for BB to be licensed" (p. 256). Its only
preconditions are "the lack of a strong accent, potentially also a
lower pitch ... together with a tight connection between the two
syllables making up the iambic sequence" (ibid.).

In alphabetic notation (with the letters A to D representing heavy
(upper case) and light (lower case) syllables as, for example,
"ABcDABcDABcD"), Meyer's law rules out unaccented word-ends of the form
...CD/ or ...ccD/, i.e., it requires a single light syllable in the "c"
position. Fortson examines violations of this "law." He agrees with
Soubiran and Ceccarelli that it is not strictly enough observed to be
called a "hard-and-fast rule," pp. 74-5[[4]] and concludes that it
describes at least two separate phenomena. The monosyllables that
follow violations in the first metron are "phonologically left-leaning
so as to form a close prosodic unit (C D A) before the caesura" (p.
74), e.g., the nunc in apscede etiam nunc (scanned ABccDA), Aul. 55;
those following violations in the second metron are right-leaning, so
as to make the final unit in the line self-contained (e.g., the si in
...dicat. Si dixerit (scanned CDABcD), As. 800. Scholars' tendency to
use the word "monosyllable" in describing allowable exceptions to the
law has obscured the distinction between left- and right-leaning
clitics, and thus differences between first and second measure
violations. To account for this observed difference, Fortson suggests
that the left-leaning clitics produced a phonological reduction of the
preceding word: the long syllable in the "C" position "would have been
shorter and less prominent than if the word were alone or standing at
the end of its phrase" (p. 61). He adduces a cross-linguistic argument,
drawing on the concept of overlengthening (which makes long vowels
longer and more prominent in stressed than in unstressed syllables):
the left-leaning words either formed a clitic group with reaccentuation
(e.g., ULtro fit becoming ulTROfit) or simply made the stressed
syllable "shorter relative to the length it would have had if it had
stood in isolation" (p. 62, on the grounds that this kind of shortening
-- called "refooting" -- can happen inside groups larger than the word
or clitic group).

The discussion of Meyer's law illustrates both the strengths of the
book and some of the challenges presented by the data. Because Fortson
focuses on explaining the violations, he notices a pattern of
differences between first and second measure violations evident in
Questa's examples (most of the violations followed by a monosyllable
are in the first measure, and of those followed by quadrisyllables, in
the second measure). Questa does not mention this pattern[[5]], nor
does Ceccarelli, who notes the low frequency of word breaks at the
first D (and relatively high frequency of violations of Meyer's law)
but explicates the imbalance only in terms of aesthetics (Plautus
sought rhythmic variety).[[6]] Fortson is also the first to note and
attempt to explain why monosyllables tend to lean leftward after CD/,
but rightward after cD/. Because he looks for a linguistic basis for
metrical phenomena, he seeks explanations in the unconscious behavior
of native speakers, rather than the conscious application of a
complicated set of rules (drawing, for example, on concepts such as
prosodic domains and phrase structure rather than coining terms like
"metrical word" (for propter me, erga me, Questa p. 401) or
"quadrisyllabic group" (for labes popli, idem, p. 387)). However
difficult archaic Latin phonology may be to recover, this kind of
explanation has an inherent plausibility. Mastering highly complex
rules is part of normal language acquisition but far more difficult, if
not impossible, for a system that is learned later, such as a second
language or iambo-trochaic metrics (particularly, one might add, since
the latter was still being reinvented for Latin).

Fortson takes a conservative approach to the text, trying to explain
rather than emend violations of Meyer's law, partly out of principle
("the readings of P are part of the historical record just as surely as
A is and must be explained," p. 89) and partly out of necessity (if we
conceded, with Laidlaw, that "there is no theory under the sun for
which an array of support could not be collected from the scribal
errors in the P-archetype", then "Plautine philology would virtually
grind to a halt", p. 89). Many will sympathize. There will, however, be
disagreement about the textually problematic cases. For example, one
potential first-measure violation of Meyer's law, quid vos maestos tam
tristisque esse conspicor (scanned ABCDABCDaBcD,  Bac. 669), requires
what Fortson concedes is a "very unusual positioning of tam following
the adjective it modifies", not found in the standard dictionaries or
Lexicon Plautinum (p. 56). Editors have emended the passage and even
disputed whether it is iambic. Fortson ultimately dismisses the textual
problem ("whether the passage is correct as transmitted is not of great
moment for any of my arguments; either way tam would be prosodically
most closely grouped with maestos" p. 57). This is true, but if the
order is reversed there is no breach of Meyer's law and even if the
text is sound it is hard to see how this passage preserves evidence of
the phonology of ordinary speech. The one example I can find of a
postponed tam is at Ecl. 5.83, nec percussa iuuant fluctu tam litora.
Its very occurrence in Virgil and not in a colloquial context would
argue against its being an "allowable rhythm of natural speech" (p. 4)
and cast some doubt on the idea that the metrics here really is
providing a "window on the prosody of [Plautus'] Latin" (p. 5).

Fortson is disarmingly frank about the problems of the text and
recognizes that not all manuscript readings can or should be defended
(e.g., he rejects on textual grounds two examples of iambic shortening
before -que, p. 252 n. 58). He faces textual problems squarely and
objectively: anything that could affect the argument is discussed in a
note. These problems do mean that different editors will identify
different instances of a phenomenon (the breach of Meyer's law at Bac.
669 discussed above, for example, or possible aphaeresis after a long
vowel plus -s, e.g., haecst, rest (< res est), which "almost all
scholars have emended...out of existence" p. 134 n. 4). Similar
problems arise when the scansion of a line is disputed. As Fortson
admits, "a number of these lines can be read in more than one way, each
way a violation of a different metrical 'law'" (p. 81). These cases are
treated carefully, however, and the book's arguments are made on the
basis of less problematic examples. Samples are relatively small, in
some cases because the phenomenon is rare and in others because the
author excludes a subgroup from a total number of examples (e.g.,
grammaticalized expressions such as opus est are excluded from the pool
of -us nouns followed by aphaeretized es/est on the grounds that
aphaeresis in the former case cannot have been linguistically
motivated) or simply decided to reduce the sample to a manageable size
(e.g., taking the first 76 lines of Menaechmi to test for skews in the
distribution of stressed heavy syllables (pp. 64-5), essentially a
question about the coincidence of ictus and accent, although Fortson is
agnostic about the existence of a verse ictus in Plautus and therefore
does not discuss it).

Fortson does not make claims about anything with fewer than a dozen
data points, so samples are large enough to generate skews that are
probably not due to chance. For example, in the 76-line sample from
Menaechmi, he finds a ratio of 28 stressed to 8 unstressed heavy
syllables in second-metron B, and 5:35 in second-metron C. It is not
unreasonable to conclude from this that phonetic differences between
stressed and unstressed heavy syllables are relevant to the metrics
("it is possible that this reflects a desire to avoid placing stressed
heavy syllables in the second C," p. 65) but it is surprising that
there are no quantitative statements about the likelihood that this is
due to chance. This would not have been difficult to calculate (Fortson
himself notes that "further statistical tests would be needed for this
to be firmly established" p. 65) and is becoming the norm in this type
of research (for an example in Plautine studies, see De Melo 2007, q.v.
p. 15 n. 24, for references on statistics and language research
generally[[7]]). There are some problems in the choice of samples. For
example, Fortson collects examples of second metron loci Jacobsohniani
(second or third metron "D" position syllables filled by a single light
syllable, i.e., d, not D or dd) from the 1132 iambo-trochaic lines of
the Miles (89 times or 7.9%) but uses the entire Plautine corpus for
examples in the first metron (100 times or 0.6%, these examples having
been collected by earlier scholars). The choice of a single play as a
sample assumes no change over time, but this seems unlikely, given that
at least one metrical phenomenon -- the ratio of cantica to
iambo-trochaics -- is known to have changed over Plautus' career and a
poet's use of iambic trimeters, in particular, can change (witness the
case of Euripides). Since the Miles is probably an early play, it is
less likely to be typical, and so choosing it as a sample may have
introduced a bias that could have been eliminated (for example, by
choosing 1000 random lines out of the total number of iambo-trochaic
lines).

Fortson's strengths are as a linguist and philologist. He cites
cross-linguistic parallels from an array of languages that rarely
appear in books on Plautus: Latvian, Serbo-Croatian, Walayalam,
Ponapean, Nez Perce, Menomini, Goroa, Bhojpuri. Some will be more
comfortable with arguments based on romance language developments
(e.g., the French impersonal clitic on as evidence for reduction of the
word homo in phrases such as illic homo, p. 41, or French/Italian ma,
ta, as evidence that synizesis in meus, tuos, etc. reflects vowel
coalescence, rather than iambic shortening) than the assumption that
tone-sandhi in Fuzhou can tell us something about intonational phrasing
in Latin (p. 108). But Fortson points out that there are solid
linguistic grounds for stressing the commonalities in human language
("One of the greatest contributions that the linguistic sciences have
made, especially in more recent times, is the demonstration that
superficially very different languages are in fact astoundingly similar
at practically every level of grammar" p. 6). He cites the example of
function words, which typically become part of the prosodic domain of
nearby stressed words, to explain some apparent exceptions to the law
of the split anapest: "ut o-", in ut opinione is allowed, but not "-cit
e-", in dicit elephans. Given the enormous difficulties of recovering
the phonology of archaic Latin (the epigraphic evidence, which Fortson
cites frequently, often brings more problems than answers),
cross-linguistic evidence may be the best place to turn. Fortson is
careful about pushing this evidence too far. For example, for
first-measure Meyer's law violations followed by a left-leaning clitic,
he concludes only that "some process like refooting operated on these
long C's that explains the word distribution patterns" (p. 63, citing
Devine and Stephens[[8]]). Here, as elsewhere, the book shows caution
and very careful thought about its underlying assumptions.

The style is appropriate to the subject. There are some minor
inconsistencies arising from attempts to strike a balance between
precision and accessibility (e.g., arguing against, but still using,
traditional language such as law, violation, breach, using "prosodic"
in a metrical, not linguistic, sense on p. 55, or referring to a
"lengthened" syllable on p. 76, alongside "heavy" vs. "light"
syllables). There is a lot of cross-referencing and deferring of
arguments that can make the book hard to follow (I had trouble
identifying the Gustafson's "different analysis" of line-end
monosyllables preceded by syntactic break, mentioned at p. 91, or
locating where it was argued that the univerbation of clitic groups is
"at best unproved and at worst unlikely" p. 71). A subject index would
have been extremely useful (there is an index locorum). The longer
lists of examples are useful for reference but do not make lively
reading (e.g., the 43 examples of loci Jacobsohniani after short C's,
organized alphabetically by play, pp. 79-81). In this, the book is more
in the tradition of metrical than linguistic studies.[[9]]

Meticulous care went into every stage of this project, from the
research to the final proofreading. Errors are few and minor, and the
author's breadth of knowledge is impressive. One small example: a
beautifully learned note argues that the rare examples of feminine
nominative singulars in long -a in Plautus are true archaisms,
comparing these with the equally rare -osio genitives preserved in a
few archaic Latin texts (in both cases, the preponderance are personal
names) and drawing an illuminating parallel with Lycian, which also
preserves Proto-Indo-European -oso in names (p. 85 n. 109). Students or
scholars interested in an early Latin project should read Fortson's
encouraging note (p. 109 n. 30) about the work that needs to be done in
sacral language in Plautus.

This is a welcome contribution to a field that has, with the notable
exception of C. Questa (2007), seen relatively little recent work, even
though metrical issues are crucial to anyone who works with the text of
Plautus (currently being re-edited in the Editio Plautina Sarsinatis
series). It is the nature of this type of study to have an impact
primarily on a small circle, but its indirect effects are potentially
much wider. It offers a new line of argument to those who want to see
Plautus as an original Italian artist who drew on native traditions,
rather than a derivative importer of Greek culture. It explains
differences from Greek metrics in terms of Latin phonology, and even
suggests that an oral tradition may lurk behind phenomena such as the
metrical regularity of final feet ("While Plautus is no longer
operating in an oral-formulaic tradition, some of the poetic forms he
implemented are descended from ones used in such a tradition and carry
over many of the same properties from it" p. 96). The book's most
important contribution, however, is to re-examine metrical phenomena
through the lens of linguistics. It shows how evidence of archaic Latin
phonology may be recovered from observed metrical behavior in Plautus,
and offers, in particular, new insights into what constitutes a
phonological "word" and arguments for the prosodic reduction of verbs.
It shows how evidence preserved in the manuscripts can be obscured by
editorial decisions based on "laws", some of which are no more than
"tendencies" (and comparative studies, such as Soubiran, show
significant differences between Plautus and other authors of
iambo-trochaic verse). In its integration of philology and modern
linguistics, the book contributes to an important broadening of the
boundaries of the field.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments VII
Abbreviations and Symbols XI
Chapter One: Preliminaries 1
Chapter Two: Plautine Iambo-Trochaics 20
Chapter Three: The Linguistic Background of Luchs's Law 34
Chapter Four: Meyer's and Jacobsohn's Laws 54
Chapter Five: Enjambement 98
Chapter Six: The Aphaeresis of Est 134
Chapter Seven: Breuis Breuians I 176
Chapter Eight: Breuis Breuians II 217
Chapter Nine: Towards a Reconstruction of the Prosody of Plautine Latin
Speech 259
Bibliography 271
Index Locorum 289
------------------
Notes:


1.   Ceccarelli, L., 1988. La norma di Meyer nei versi giambici e
trocaici di Plauto e Terenzio. Rome: Ediun Coopergion.  Drexler, H.,
1969. Die Iambenkuerzung. Hildesheim: Olms.

2.   Soubiran, J. 1988. Essai sur la versification dramatique des
Romains: se/naire iambique et septe/naire trochai+que. Paris: Centre
national de la recherche scientifique.

3.   Devine, A. M. and Stephens, L. D. 1994, The Prosody of Greek
Speech. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4.   Soubiran (1988) p. 340. Ceccarelli (1988) p. 17.

5.   Questa, C. 2007, La Metrica di Plauto e di Terenzio. Urbino:
QuattroVenti. pp. 386-9.

6.   From Ceccarelli's (1988) figures (p. 21), word breaks at the first
D position occur in 4.3% of Plautus' senarii, with an 18% rate of
violation of Meyer's law; at the second D, in 18.2% of the lines, but
with only a 12.3% violation rate.

7.   De Melo, W. C. de 2007, The Early Latin Verb System: Archaic Forms
in Plautus, Terence, and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8.   Devine and Stephens (1994), pp. 273-4.

9.   Cf. De Melo (2007), who limits the examples cited in the actual
text and provides brief context and translation for each, or Devine and
Stephens (1994) and (2006), who also provide translations.