Usurpo, usurpatio, usurpativus: uso e cattivo uso nella terminologia grammaticale latina

The verb usurpo and its derivatives are frequently employed by the Latin grammarians: this specific field of application of these lemmata, for which the corresponding entries of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae are still missing, nor has been taken into account by Forcellini and in the Oxford Latin Dictionary neither has been exhaustively investigated by S. Schad in her Lexicon of Latin Grammatical Terminology (2007). This paper presents the results of the comprehensive survey of the metalinguistic uses of usurpo, usurpatio, usurpativus, and usurpative, based on the material collected in the Archive of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae; particular attention has been paid to the semantic values and syntactic uses of usurpo and its derivatives in the corpus of the Latin grammarians and in the main late antique commentators (Donatus, Servius). The verb can mean either simply ‘to use’ or, more specifically, ‘to use improperly’. The use of usurpo in one meaning or the other casts light on the different theoretical approaches (either prescriptive or descriptive, with reference either to the common use or to the literary language) adopted by the various grammarians in their expositions.