Abstract :
[en] The language and style of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (NH) have been studied under many
points of views. Criticized because far from literary standards, studied as an example of technical
text, the NH still remains difficult to situate in the wider frame of Latin literary production. This
dissertation deals with the language and communicative issues of the second book of the NH (NH
II), on astronomical and meteorological questions. NH II has been inserted in a corpus of Latin
texts lemmatized and morphosyntactically annotated according to the methods of L.A.S.L.A. The
corpus is analyzed with the use of specific textometric tools with the aim of selecting the linguistic
features that characterize NH II. The statistical tests focus on the simple phrase, on clause
combining, and on discourse organization. The linguistic phenomena, selected on the basis of
statistical criteria, are analyzed using the categories and methods of functional and pragmatic
linguistics. More precisely, the linguistic features analyzed are the use of the ablative (functions,
distribution, vocabulary), of the participle (nominal and verbal), and of the particles et, autem and
uero. The features of the prose of NH II prose are regularly compared with those of the ninth book
of Vitruvius’ De Architectura and of the seventh book of Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones, and of
the texts within the corpus that display results similar to those of NH II. The purpose of this
research is not only to describe the language of NH II, but also to put the book in relation to other
texts in the corpus and to integrate it into the wider debate about the language of technical and
scientific Latin texts.