OUP (2015) h/b 1,430pp £125 (ISBN 9780199283613)
This formidable work does not lend itself to being reviewed in a forum such as this, and what follows will be descriptive rather than evaluative: even that may be of only limited assistance to the prospective purchaser, who/which will, however, almost certainly be an institution (university or college) rather than an individual. The material is set out, in Contents which occupy 25 pages, in 13 chapters, containing over 800 headings and sub-headings, and intended to be a successor (says the author in his Preface, curiously placed after the Contents) to Kuehner-Stegmann’s Satzlehre of a century ago, with of course much updating. It may be helpful to list the chapter headings:- 1. Introduction; 2. Basic grammatical concepts; 3. Latin word classes and inflectional categories; 4. Verb frames; 5. Active/passive, reflexivity, and intransitivization; 6. Sentence type and illocutionary force; 7. The semantic values of the Latin tenses and moods; 8. Negation; 9. Syntactic functions of arguments and the categories of constituents that may fulfil them; 10. Satellites; 11. The noun phrase; 12. Cases and prepositions; 13. Agreement.
What this means is that the work does not follow the standard, and therefore familiar, format of (say) Kennedy or Gildersleeve and Lodge. Thus, rather than finding a chapter on the use of the genitive case, the reader must go to the (comprehensive) index, where s/he will find what is sought under one or other of the roughly 100 sub-headings listed under ‘genitive’. Your reviewer’s necessarily selective sampling of other subjects leads him to believe that the searcher is unlikely to be disappointed: thus, he found the references to the subjunctive mood to be notably helpful and complete.
The work is generous (to a fault?) in its use of examples, with Cicero (about 1500 citations) and Plautus (nearly 1800) to the fore. In general, the period covered runs from c.200 BC to AD 450, and the most recently available electronic texts are used, usually those of Teubner, though for Plautus the text is that of the Loeb Library edition of W.de Melo, and for Terence P. uses the Oxford Classical Text. P. also refers to ‘the attention devoted to textual critical problems’, though this is hardly a matter of the first importance. It is noteworthy that P. has tried (because of the fall ‘in the average user’s knowledge’ [sc. of Latin]) to give more attention to the rules than did Kuehner-Stegmann, rather than to exceptions to the rules, and he has added translations to the examples in the main text. Overall, the approach is descriptive in that the Syntax ‘tries to define the rules underlying the utterances that are actually attested, and [significant] deviations from those rules’.
No fewer than ten colleagues or collaborators are named (and thanked) as having read the entire text. Even so, it would be astonishing if nothing had slipped through the net. However, the reviewer has spotted only one alarming typo. In the discussion of haud and non, a table is provided of usage of these words in ten major authors. Unfortunately, it lists Vergil (so spelt) as using haud on only 10 occasions, whereas his actual usage of the word, according to H. Merguet’s Lexicon zu Vergilius (1912), comes to about 110. P. also claims that a preliminary table of contents of his forthcoming Volume 2 (complex sentences and discourse phenomena) is provided, which your reviewer has been unable to locate. The lengthy Bibliography includes Roby’s Latin Grammar, which indeed is referred to from time to time in footnotes, but not the grammars of Kennedy or Gildersleeve and Lodge. There is a huge Index Locorum, and, as noted, a comprehensive Index.
This is a reference work for use by professional scholars, all the more valuable since Kuehner-Stegmann has long been very difficult to obtain. However, while the reviewer will not be throwing away his copy of W.M. Lindsay’s The Latin Language (1894), he adds that it is a great pity that the late Anna Morpurgo Davies is no longer here to appraise P.’s monumental achievement.
Colin Leach