The relationship between grammar and discourse: evidence from the Latin particle quidem

What is it about?

Descriptions of the Latin particle quidem tend to centre on the concept of adversativity or contrast. In this paper I propose an alternative account in which quidem is described not as a marker of a specific type of semantic relationship, but rather as a fairly neutral marker of the discourse Organization. More specifically, it indicates that its host unit is to be regarded as a constitutive part of a larger conceptual whole. This account is based mainly on the Observation that in a heterogeneous corpus of about 1000 instances quidem occurs significantly often where grammatical structure and discourse structure do not coincide, that is, in those environments in which communicative autonomy clashes with semantico-syntactic dependency.

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