Cohesion in Latin.

Abstract

This article discusses ancient and modern concepts of textual coherence and in Latin. A number of ideas about the degree of cohesion in the letters of Cicero, compared with those of Seneca and Pliny are discussed. The article shows that Seneca and Pliny make more use of asyndeton within the sentence than Cicero, and undertakes a statistical analysis of coordinate and subordinate connectors in a selected corpus of texts. This analysis gives a reliable indication of the degree of cohesion in the corpus.