Abstract

PASILLAS MENDOZA, Rebeca. Semantics of the Explicit Lexical Subject and the Implicit Third-Person Subject in Latin: Definiteness, Animacy and Agentivity. Nova tellus [online]. 2025, vol.43, n.2, pp.145-180.  Epub Sep 26, 2025. ISSN 0185-3058.  https://doi.org/10.19130/iifl.nt.2025.43.2/x001w03a250697.

This paper presents a semantic and contrastive description of both the explicit lexical subject and the implicit third-person subject in Latin, according to their features of definiteness, animacy and agentivity. Its aim is to set out that Semantics helps to explain the explicit or implicit presence of a subject. We show that both types of subjects have different semantic dynamics, in addition, we propose a hierarchy of features for the category, according to the information provided by our corpus. By doing this, we provide the description of a central aspect of Latin, which to date has not been fully addressed in grammatical studies. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts from the 1st century BC are displayed as a proof.

Keywords : Explicit Subject; Implicit Subject; pro-drop; Definiteness; Animacy; Agentivity.

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