The epistolary corpus of Jerome of Stridon: analysis of his use of deictics

Jerome of Stridon's knowledge of classical authors is well documented: not only in terms of quotations and reminiscences (Fraisse 1999; Godel 1964; Hagendahl 1974; Jeanjean 2014), but also in the purity and clarity of his language (Hritzu 1939; Canellis 2002). Saint Jerome is indeed the forefather of modern humanists, distinguished as the Father of the Church in whom the fusion of ancient and Christian ideas is best represented (Goelzer 1884). But to what extent do his language and style reflect his classicist soul on the one hand and the linguistic changes in Latin of his time on the other? In Jerome's works, we find syntactic constructions unknown in classical Latin, such as the construction of verba dicendi with ‘ad + accusative’ instead of the dative, a prelude to the structures of the Romance languages.
To answer this question, I will analyse his use of deictics in his corpus of letters (124 letters). We know that demonstrative pronouns began to weaken semantically and gradually took on the function of articles from Late Latin onwards (Carlier et al. 2010): was this also the case for the Ciceronian Jerome? His epistolary corpus will be examined using Hyperbase software (cf. Vanni 2020), which will allow us to compare and contrast it with two other corpora, one consisting of most of the prose works of the classical period and the other consisting of a selection of hagiographic works from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in order to carry out a statistical and quantitative analysis of the use and frequency of deictics in the different corpora. Next, an analysis will be conducted on how Jerome uses demonstratives in his letters, analysing certain passages from his text and comparing them with others taken from classical and hagiographic works.