372 LAURA Α. MICHAELIS
(ii) Quos quis audiat mea magni interest.
whom(A) someone(N) listens.to m(AB) greatly concerns.
"It is of great importance to me who someone listens to."
This coding of the locative has commonly been said to be the result of a folk
etymology whereby the re in referí was held to be the ablative singular of res ,
"matter" (F), and the feminine ablatives mea, tua, etc. used to modify this nomi
nal. The use of this ablative adjective with interest is often attributed to some con
tamination effect within the class. Hence, it would seem that the genitively
marked locative is the more basic, with the special ablative marking of the cog-
nizer the effect of morphemic reanalysis. The more general formulation of the
genitive-coding principle then appears a tenable account of the case manifested by
the "subjects" of verbs like pudet, paenitet, and taedet.- Sentence (30c), as pointed out by Baldi (1983), constitutes an exception to the
coding principle whereby the agents in passive periphrastic constructions appear
in the dative. The appearance here of an ab-phrase rather than the expected
dative is explained by Baldi as a means of ambiguity avoidance — the use of two
datives would result in confusion as to which of the two dative NPs — ei ("him")
or mihi ("me") is the "logical subject" and which the indirect object.
References
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Bolkestein, A.M. 1976. "A.c.i and ut-Clauses with verba dicendi in Latin". Glotta
54.263-291.. 1979. "Subject-to-Object Raising in Latin?" Lingua 48.15-34.
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. 1985. "Information Packaging in the Clause". Language Typology and Syntactic
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Jensen, John T. 1983. "Case and Thematic Role in Latin: Evidence from Passive Con
structions". Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club.
Lakoff, Robin T. 1968. Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation. Cambridge, Mass.:
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Maraldi, Mirka. 1983. "New Approaches to Accusative Subjects: Case Theory vs. Rais
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Longman.