The frequency of syncope in the Latin of the empire: a statistical and dialectological study based on the analysis of inscriptions.

About the frequency of syncope in the Latin of the Empire one can observe two opposite views circulating in the literature: on the one hand scholars who are working principally with the Latin inscriptional material commonly say that syncope «is not particularly widespread» or «was not a common phenomenon in Vulgar Latin inscriptions». On the other hand, scholars, mainly of Romance rather than of Latin, who rely on sources of Latin other than inscriptions or on evidences of the Romance languages, are prone to formulate the opposite view. This state of research generalizing in both directions (i.e. syncope was scarce everywhere vs. it was frequent overall) was (or at least could have been) challenged by a brief and excellent (but in the literature, in essence, unnoticed) study of J. Herman, who found that in this regard the Latin speaking part of the Empire was not homogeneous at all. Herman, however, regarded his results as provisional and the entire question as worth re-examining in detail («la question mériterait d' être réexaminée en détail»). Therefore in my paper I intend to re-examine the problem of the frequency of syncope and to continue and expand the investigations started by Herman with the help of an upgraded version of his methodology and based on the data collected to date in the «Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age».