Syntactic change and sociolinguistic variation: Expressing purposes in Late Latin

In the Latin language there is a wide array of possibilities to express purposive relations between two events. The scope of this research is to highlight how different constructions and their distribution changed in the transition from Old to Late Latin. To address this issue, two collections of Latin texts are compared, one representative of Old Latin (III-II century BC), and the other one representative of Late Latin (III-VI century AD). All occurrences of purposive structures are manually retrieved in the texts and undergo quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results are interpreted considering not only the more general syntactic changes that took place during the history of the language, but also sociolinguistic factors.