With or without ut? Full evidence of subjunctive complementation of uolo in Archaic Latin.

This paper explores whether the presence or absence of ut in the subjunctival complementation of uolo in Archaic Latin – specifically Plautus and Terence – has any underlying rule. In more than two-thirds of their instances, inflected forms of uolo appear in juxtaposition with their subjunctival clauses, i. e. without a conjoining ut. This juxtaposition occurs most often in some high-frequency collocations, with larger distances between main and subordinate verbs, and in interrogative sentences. The most relevant criterion, however, turns out to be the morphology of uolo itself: 91 % of all 'uolo + subjunctive' tokens are restricted to only three forms. These results indicate that the usage of uolo + subjunctive was already specialized in Archaic Latin. To test this theory, data from Cicero show that the subjunctive complementation of uolo as a whole, with or without a subordinating ut, was under a process of fossilization: the existing tendencies of Archaic Latin are intensified in Classical Latin. The results for uolo are finally compared with similar data for facio (Mazzanti 2020), and similar results are evidenced: distance between main and subordinate verbs and main verb morphology are the main factors determining the use of the conjunction. Subjunctive subordinate clauses without an introductory ut therefore seem to have undergone a process of fossilization between Archaic and Classical Latin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]