The creativity of Late Latin authors: The case of marking direct discourse

Investor logo
Authors

MIKULOVÁ Jana

Year of publication 2021
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description The innovations and creativity of Late Latin authors gave origin to a tangle of old and new traits. The evidence is provided by the change of means used to mark direct discourse from Cicero’s times up to the Carolingian Renaissance. On the one hand, Late texts display some undeniable general trends, such as change of preferred verbs, an increase of diversity of marking means, and introduction of the new marker dicens “saying” under the biblical influence. On the other hand, Late Latin authors did not drop Classical markers altogether. In contrast, some of them tried to adhere to Classical models. However, even these did not use direct discourse markers exactly as Cicero had done. They often changed Classical patterns and combined different elements. Thus, Late Latin authors created a new standard that survived the end of Latin as a mother tongue and is likely to have influenced texts outside the Romance territory, as some Czech Medieval texts suggest.
Related projects:

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.