The Analysis of Classical Greek and Latin Compositional Word-Order Data

The Analysis of Classical Greek and Latin Compositional
Word-Order Data

Fiona
J.
Tweedie
Department: Statistics University of
Glasgow
fiona@stats.gla.ac.uk

Bernard
D.
Frischer
Dept. of Classics University of
California
frischer49@aol.com

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Introduction
A recent paper by Frischer et al. (1999) examines the position of the direct
object and its governing verb in works in Classical Greek and Latin. Through
statistical analysis of a great number of sentences, one long suspected
difference between Latin and Greek word-order was confirmed, and the
ramifications of this observation were explored for some possible cases of
word-order transference between Latin and Greek. The difference between the
languages concerns the positioning of the accusative direct object with
respect to the verb governing it. That there is a difference in the Greek
and Latin distributions is no surprise: Classical linguists have long
observed that Latin has a greater tendency to place the verb at the end of
the clause than does Greek. From this fact alone one might predict that the
direct object in Latin is more likely to precede than to follow the verb on
which it depends than is the case in Greek. This prediction was tested
empirically by tabulating the direct object distributions in sixty passages
written by fifteen Latin and ten Greek prose authors. Each passage was
randomly selected in the text of an author. Analysis was based on the first
one hundred direct objects in the accusative case that were encountered in a
passage, and a tabulation was done of those that occurred before and those
after the governing verbs. With remarkable consistency, the texts in our
sample clumped into a Latin and a Greek cluster, offering strong empirical
and statistically significant proof that the position of the direct object
with respect to its governing verb differed in Greek and Latin prose.
Five Greek texts by two authors writing in Greek turned out to be anomalous,
fitting firmly into the Latin group. Four of the texts were written by
Cassius Dio; the fifth is the Greek translation of the Emperor Augustus'
Res Gestae, a bilingual version of which
survives, and whose original is known to have been written in Latin.
In considering the results, including the anomalous texts, the study showed
that native language did not necessarily have an effect on a writer's
placement of the direct object; nor did the language of an important
literary or historical source. Native Greek authors writing in Latin
respected Latin word order; Romans writing in Greek generally conformed to
Greek practice.
The study suggested that some but not all explanations for the data are
linguistic. On the linguistic level, it was the greater consistency of Latin
SOV word-order that helped the Latin pattern to prevail over the more
flexible Greek positioning of the verb and direct object. This was true not
only for Roman authors writing Latin with a Greek source before them (like
Aulus Gellius or Cicero) but also for a Greek author like Ammianus
Marcellinus writing in Latin. It was evidently normally easy for both Greeks
and Romans to recognize and to respect the tendency of Latin to place the
verb at the end of the clause. On the other hand, in the interesting case of
the Greek translation of the Res Gestae and other
official documents, where the Roman chancellery's habit of translating Latin
into Greek through quasi-relexification was seen, the study proposed an
explanation based either on Roman scrupulosity in legal matters or on a
sociological factor of linguistic hegemony. Finally, in the case of Cassius
Dio there was seen the operation of a psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic
cause for word-order transference: Dio's conscious or unconscious
presentation of himself as a Roman.
The data sets used by Frischer et al. list for each text sample the number of
direct objects that occur before the governing verb
in main clauses (MCB) and other clauses (OB) as well as the number of direct
objects that occur after the governing verb in main
clauses (MCA) and other clauses (OA). In most cases the total number of
direct objects is 100. There are a few samples where only 99 sentences were
examined, the data have been rescaled to have a total of 100. Frischer et
al. (1999) treat the number of clauses in each of the categories as
separate, independent random variables. Quantitative linguists and
stylometricians may not be aware of a well-known problem that affects the
"standard" statistical analysis of compositional data, that is, when dealing
with data that adds up to a known total. This presentation aims to explain
the problem, present one approach that succeeds in solving it; and apply
this approach to such statistical techniques such as principal components
analysis, cluster analysis and discriminant analysis. The conclusions of
Frischer et al. (1999) will be re-examined.

Compositional Data Analysis
The statistical analysis detailed in the previous section produces easily
interpretable results; separate clusters of Latin and Greek authors.
However, the authors ignore a constraint on the data, that the number of
clauses examined is always one hundred. This constraint has far-reaching
implications, Aitchison (1986) shows that that interpretation of the
covariance matrix of data with a constrained sum is fraught with problems.
Thus any analysis of the data which involves the covariance matrix is also
suspect. This includes principal components analysis, discriminant analysis
and certain versions of cluster analysis. We shall use compositional data
analysis analogues of these techniques to investigate these data.
Logcontrast principal components analysis and logcontrast cluster analysis
broadly confirm the results from the crude analysis and add refinements; the
Graecian nature of Varro's word-ordering and the highlighting of genre
differences with Tacitus appear to merit further investigation. In addition,
some Greek texts of Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius appear more Latinate than
had been previously noticed.
Discriminant analysis results in these Greek texts being classed as Latinate,
while Tacitus' Agricola is classified as Graecian.
In addition, the texts by Cassius Dio and the Greek version of the Res Gestae are classed as Latinate.
Further work is currently being undertaken on other works by Varro which
appears to indicate that his word-order straddles the Greek-Latin boundary.
This will be reported in detail at the conference.

References:

J.
Aitchison

The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data
Monographs in Statistics and Applied
Probability

London
Chapman and Hall
1986

B.
D.
Frischer

R.
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S.
Burnstein

J.
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H.
Dik

R.
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A.
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D.
Guthrie

M.
Haslam

D.
I.
Holmes

V.
Rudich

R.
K.
Sherk

A.
Taylor

F.
J.
Tweedie

B.
Vine

Word-order transference between Latin and Greek: The
relative position of the accusative direct object and the governing
verb in Cassius Dio and other Greek and Roman prose authors

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

1999

Forthcoming