A proposal to consider the teaching of Latin: reduced clauses with participles in the ablative case. Their insertion in the left periphery of the sentence

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal to think about teaching of a kind of syntactic construction in Latin: participle small clauses in ablative, traditionally called ablative absolute, and will focus on a particularly complex problem: the insertion of this small clauses in the left periphery of the nuclear sentence. We consider that an exhaustive grammatical description of the object is important for the design of teaching in the context of the university. In the theoretical framework of generative grammar, the discussion about the syntactic hierarchy of elements that do not strictly belong to the syntax of the nuclear sentence, and that are inserted in the so-called left periphery of the sentence, has gained particular relevance since the works of Rizzi (1997) and Cinque (1999). However, in the research field of Latin grammar, the insertion in the left periphery of participle small clauses in ablative, and its teaching has not received much attention.