10/10/2026
You are invited to our next Linguistics Research Seminar:
Tuesday, 13 October 2026
with Boris Kayachev (Trinity College Dublin) on
" Latin prosody and pragmatics: a poetic perspective'
About the Talk
Abstract: Latin is an inflectional language with a flexible word order; unlike, e.g., English, it uses word endings rather than word order to express syntax.
This does not mean Latin word order is unconstrained or random: some patterns are less frequent than others (or absent altogether), and different patterns can convey different meanings, particularly pragmatic ones.
Yet attempts to explain Latin word order as a function of information structure, though far from fruitless, have yielded limited results: pragmatics is not the only factor determining word order, and it does so in a complex way.
In modern languages, prosody often plays a crucial role in expressing pragmatic meaning, and we can expect the same for Latin. Yet since Latin is a corpus language, and prosody is not systematically recorded in writing, we have no direct access to Latin prosody.
The key hypothesis of this project is that metrical breaks in poetry impose prosodic breaks, and when these occur in (syntactically) unexpected places, we can learn something new about Latin prosody.
More specifically, Boris will examine the metrical/prosodic break that follows verse-initial spondaic words in Latin dactylic poetry, or rather, the words themselves.
His claim is that the following break conveys on them prosodic salience, which can in turn (barring any alternative explanations) in most cases be shown to entail pragmatic salience.
Beyond a general overview of the approach, he will examine examples of verse-initial spondaic words from the three main classes of content words, verbs, nouns, and adjectives (the use of adverbs is pretty limited in Latin poetry), and discuss the insights this approach can produce for each class.
About the Speaker
Boris Kayachev is a Research Fellow in Trinity’s Department of Classics, where he works on the SFI-IRC Pathway project Enjambement in Latin poetry: prosody, pragmatics and word order. Beyond Latin linguistics, especially poetic language, Boris is interested in the textual and literary exegesis of Latin poetry.
All welcome
P.S. New LRS talk to add to your diary: 8 December 2026, Angel L. Jiménez-Fernández (University of Seville).
