David B. Wharton

Special Interests: Latin linguistics, ancient color studies, Greek philosophy.

There are 7 included publications by David B. Wharton :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Abstract and embodied color in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History 2016 447 Some prominent, recent research on Latin color language asserts that the ancient Romans mostly lacked abstract color concepts, instead conceiving of “color” as intimately connected with the material substances that Latin color terms typically referre...
Attributive prepositional phrases in Latin prose 1996 129 I will present data that touch upon the previous, intuitive estimates concerning the relative frequency, and the contexts of occurrence, of APPs in Latin prose, using as my sample texts prose authors ranging diachronically from Cato to Tacitus. These...
Linguistic semantics and the representation of word meanings in Latin dictionaries 2011 265 Acquiring accurate and detailed knowledge of word meanings is one of the most difficult tasks that face second language learners, especially when words have more than one meaning. Thus those of us who study ancient languages need particularly good di...
On the distribution of adnominal prepositional phrases in Latin prose 2009 886 The use of prepositional phrases as elements in noun phrases in Latin—to be sure, a rather restricted use of prepositions—is a phenomenon that has not been deeply studied. It is sometimes taught in schools that such phrases are simply not allowed in ...
Prestige, color, and color language in Imperial Rome 2020 1033 This paper explores some ways that the human desire for prestige affected language in early Imperial discourses of color. It identifies the desire for prestige as a fundamental human psychological disposition that is often expressed through the acqui...
Sunt lacrimae rerum: An exploration in meaning 2008 1960 The half-line at Aeneid 2.462, sunt lacrimae rerum, although one of the most quoted and controversial utterances in Vergil's poem, has received little scrutiny from the point of view of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. This paper explores the int...
Tacitus’ Tiberius: The state of the evidence for the emperor’s Ipsissima Verba in the Annals 1997 949 Ronald Syme first proposed that the style and vocabulary of some of the speeches attributed to Tiberius in the Annals were strongly influenced by those actually uttered by the Emperor, as preserved in the acta senatus.