INTRODUCTION

Possessive pronouns such as meus ‘my’ or tuus ‘your’ indicate that there is a connection between two entities. This connection may be possessive, as in my book, or it may be of a different nature, as in my friend. Lexical items often belong to different stylistic registers, for instance the poetic ensis ‘sword’ and its prose equivalent gladius. Grammatical items, on the other hand, tend to be stylistically neutral. Nevertheless, possessive pronouns have found a place in several stylistic studies. There are four reasons for this:

(i) Possessive pronouns can be emphatic; in English we can use his own rather than simply his in this case. Latin has different means of emphasis. One of them is hyperbaton. Adams (1971: 1–16) has demonstrated that verbal hyperbaton (type magnam habeo gratiam ‘I am very grateful’) is still rare in early prose, but becomes more frequent in the classical period, especially when the register is elevated. In Plautus, possessive pronouns are frequently separated from their head nouns and one may wonder what their register is. Does Plautus use hyperbaton for emphasis and stylistic reasons, or is he simply forced to do so by the metre?