Support verbs and syntactic incorporation in Latin: the case of ludos facere

Abstract

In Latin, ludos facere seems to form a support verb construction. In this paper, however, I will show that two different predicate frames lie behind this construction. These two syntactic structures are, in fact, the two poles of a continuum between the frequent use of certain predicates and the syntactic incorporation. On the one hand, the analysis of these predicate frames will allow me to verify, in a corpus language such as Latin, the validity and range of the criteria that are used in other languages to characterise a support verb construction. On the other hand, the formal, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic differences between the two constructions help to explain the apparent ambiguity of some examples from Plautus.