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Latin nominative and theme in Spanish

Authors

  • Tomás Jiménez Juliá University of Santiago de Compostela image/svg+xml

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-0319.27.21

Keywords:

nominative case, syntactic theme, Spanish syntax

Abstract

In Latin, the nominative case is usually described as Subject case, but this role is a later derivation of its function as a Theme marker. The Theme expressed by the Indo-European nominative is the syntactic Theme, not to be confused with the Theme of the FSP first described by the Prague Circle. The syntactic Theme belongs to a different and broader syntactic axis than the transitive axis. While the thematic axis divides the sentence into two parts, Theme and Predicate, the transitive axis organizes the constituents of the predicate. The syntactic Theme has several semantic features that can be found in the Theme of the so-called thematic languages. The loss of the inflectional cases in Romance languages and, therefore, of the nominative case as such, brought about the need to express the Theme analytically. This paper briefly describes the behaviour of the thematic Theme in Spanish, its relation to the transitive axis and its contrast with languages in which the thematic axis is not in force, such as English.

Author Biography

  • Tomás Jiménez Juliá, University of Santiago de Compostela

    Prof. Tomás Jiménez Juliá – is Professor of Spanish Language at the University of Santiago de Compostela. His work focuses on general and Spanish syntax from a functional perspective and has published numerous works on syntactic units and relations, thematic structures, grammaticalizations and contrastive aspects of Spanish and other languages.

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Published

2024-10-30

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Issue

No. 27 (2024): Miscellanea Graeca, Latina et Hiberica. In honorem Hannae Zalewska-Jura

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Articles

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How to Cite

Jiménez Juliá, Tomás. 2024. “Latin Nominative and Theme in Spanish”. Collectanea Philologica, no. 27 (October): 323-38. https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-0319.27.21.
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