Parataxis in Latin colloquial and poetic texts : a treebank-based analysis
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Paratactic is a label applied to texts which are more informal and spontaneous in their construction. The conventional cause of this difference is that there is a natural preference for parataxis in spoken Latin which is adopted in registers similar to the spoken language in their context and style. A text is paratactic if it uses fewer finite subordinate clauses and instead constructs discourse out of disconnected main clauses. I argue here that this definition of parataxis is a poor descriptor of informal Latin, and that, defined this way, it rather characterizes stylized speech such as that found in poetry and forensic speeches. If we define simplicity as fewer components which in turn have fewer embedded components, and complexity as instead an increase in said components, then texts which are traditionally considered informal are not simpler at the level of the finite clause. I argue here that it is actually at the level of the noun phrase and specifically in participial phrases that informal texts are simpler. I use a medium-sized corpus of manually annotated dependency treebanks to operationalize this study and describe the differences between informal Latin texts, poetry, and other prose works.
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M.A.