Per peccatum cecidit diabolo faciente: оn the causal-instrumental uses of "faciente + (pro)noun" in imperial and late Latin

Conclusions

semantically latin grammaticalization preposition

In this contribution, we discussed the instrumental/causal use of faciente + (pro)- nominal head without adverbs or arguments in a large corpus including both non-literary and literary sources. The analysis lead to three central results. First, the construction is relatively well represented in the corpus, with 182 instances, from Ovid onwards, reaching its peak in the 5^th and 6^th c. AD and surviving until the late medieval period. Additionally, a notable variety emerged in terms of both nouns involved (100 in total) and literary genres and registers (see n. 13) and we may not rule out the possibility that the syntagm found its way in some spoken varieties of the language. Second, a lexical and semantic analysis of the nouns involved reveals that the participle underwent a partial categorial reanalysis as preposition. This process becomes evident through (a) the use of inanimate subjects (su- perbia, militia, peccatum, etc.), notably such as casus, necessitas, egestas, tempus etc. which exclude any form of control by a human or divine entity and (b) an explicit testimony found in Augustine's sermons (20), where faciente is used as an equivalent of the causal pattern per + accusative. Specifically, taking as reference point the grammaticalization model proposed by Heine (2000), we assumed that the evolution of the participle reached stage III, characterized by a “switch context... that no longer allows for an interpretation in terms of the source meaning”. However, the non-generalization of the word order V-N, which stably remains much less common than N-V, and of the singularfaciente (the plural facientibus is found 41 times) show that the development never attained the fourth and final stage of Heine's model, in which namely the target meaning is conventionalized. We cannot therefore speak of a proper, or full transcategorization of the participle and the reason for that is most likely to be sought in the semantic nature offacio, which prototypically displayed high agentivity features and was thus “unbalanced” towards the verbal pole. Finally, the analysis has shown that the three participles operante, instigante and praestante, often regarded in studies as synonymic alternatives to faciente, differ from it in at least two aspects. On the one hand, they are mainly restricted to Christian sources and are very often found in recurring clusters, such as Deo praestante, diabolo instigante, or Spiritu operante. On the other hand, and more importantly, the type of nouns involved indicates that they generally remained high in “verbiness” and did not thus undergo any reanalysis process. The latter difference has been crucially fostered by the fact that facio, as opposed to other verbs, kept throughout Latinity a high degree of polysemy and multifunctionality and could hence be employed in a large variety of contexts with both animate and inanimate subjects.

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