Origen Scholarship in the Service of the Church

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Latin extra-paradigmatic verbforms, that is, verb forms which cannot easily be assigned to any particulartense in the Latin verbal system. In order to see what functions such formsfulfil, one has to compare their usage to that of the regular verb forms. InPart 1, Wolfgang de Melo outlines the usage of regular verb forms, which,surprisingly, has not always been described adequately in the standard grammars.In Part 2, the central part of the book, he compares the usage of theextra-paradigmatic verb forms to that of the regular ones, restricting himselfto Archaic Latin (roughly before 100 BC); here he makes many new and unexpecteddiscoveries. In Part 3, de Melo shows how synchronic usage can help us toreconstruct earlier stages of the language which are not attested; he alsopoints out that, while most of the extra-paradigmatic forms die out after 100BC, some survive - and that such survival is by no means a matter ofchance.

Wolfgang David Cirilo de Melo is a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls, University of Oxford.