The development of deverbal prepositions in Latin: morpho-syntactic and semantico-pragmatic factors

This paper investigates the development of a few Latin deverbal prepositions, whose sources are both present and perfect participles occurring in non-finite adverbial clauses. The category shift under examination may be described as a typical case of transcategorization, and is discussed here in line with the ‘non-discreteness hypothesis of the Parts-of-Speech’. Traditionally, the development of deverbal prepositions is taken to involve a cluster of factors. The working hypothesis presented here is that not just a cluster of factors, but two separate dimensions play a role in this change. Transcategorization cannot be predicted from language-specific features alone, but is subject to precise semantico-pragmatic conditions, which can ultimately be identified with the universal properties of verbs. Finally, the actual distribution of the deverbal prepositions in question is explained in the light of sociolinguistic and stylistic variation.