The subordinators in some latin authors: quantitative aspects - qualitative remarks

The present research project is based on data bank of 148,098 subordinate clauses found in a corpus amounting to some 1,700,000 words from authors ranging from Plautus to Pliny the Younger. In each author's samples figures are established for nouns and verbs, distinguishing between main verbs, subordinate verbs and verbs that do not belong in a predicate. This makes it possible to determine the percentage of subordinate clauses for each author and so to define specific features of each author and to measure the influence of literary genres on the proportion of subordinate clauses. Subordinate clauses are computed depending on their respective nature and on the subordinating word. This results in a list of the kinds of subordinate clauses and/or of subordinating words, also in establishing the total frequency for each kind and the percentage of subordinate verbs. These processed data are then used to determine the various kinds of subordinate clauses that occur in Latin literature and their relative significance. Moreover the kinds of subordinate clauses used by each author is established so as to check for a possible influence in terms of synchronicity or diachronicity, or of the literary genre. The most frequent subordinating word is examined, namely the relative pronoun in the nominative form, and its distribution in terms of modes and tenses is established. This is how computing figures in data leads to bringing out sentence constructions that are typical of an author's style, which shows that statistics take us back to texts and help to find illustrations with characteristic syntactical forms.