Abstract

Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, a German nun who lived at the end of the tenth century, wrote six plays explicitly saying that she was trying to imitate the style of the Roman playwright Terence who lived during the II nd century B.C. Language evolved dramatically during the twelve centuries that separate the lives of the two writers. In fact, a variety of descendant languages was sprouting up all over Europe as a consequence of the process of fragmentation of the mother tongue into the Romance languages that was already well on its way by 476 A.D. One of the biggest changes undergone by the language during this process is the restriction of word order which during the Latin era seems to have enjoyed a great degree of freedom but with the time became more restricted in its possibilities. By the end of the VIII th century, the declension system had collapsed into only two cases (Nominative and Accusative) doubtlessly playing a role in restricting the word order freedom. In this thesis, I concentrate on Hrotsvitha's Callimachus and on Terence's Andria to explore and compare thoroughly the word order of some elements of the sentence, mainly the possessive adjective-head noun relationship, the ut - verb relationship in subordinated clauses, and the patterns used with the infinitives. I take into account the structure of the Romance languages to underline the direction the language was taking and to draw my conclusions. To complete my study I focus on the general organization of plays, the colloquialisms and the adverbial expressions (which are much reduced in Hrotsvitha's Callimachus ), as a sign of the restrictions that confronted the writers of Medieval Latin when they attempted to imitate the street language of Archaic and Classical times.