The book, a revised PhD thesis, by Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paléologou is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the linguistic aspects of Latin comedy. Its subject is the syntactic and semantic function of demonstrative pronouns in Plautus. P. works within a well-established theoretical framework, largely developed by the French school of linguistic semantics. The three basic notions are set forth at the outset of the book: (a) anaphora: an interpretative combination of two units, the first of which is the antecedent and the second is the anaphoric operator; (b) cataphora, that is, a non structural relation between the cataphoric element and a subsequent unit; (c) deixis, or extralinguistic anaphora, which involves the spatial and temporal presence of the referent within the physical context of enunciation.

Within this theoretical frame, P. examines anaphoric usage in Part 1, focusing, in ch. 1, on the anaphoric usage of pronouns, adjectives and adverbs. She comes to the following compelling conclusions: (a) is, ea, id function as an authentic anaphoric operator in short-distance anaphora, usually of the intraphrastic type, and also secure the narrative continuity into the past; (b) hic, haec, hoc and ille, illa, illuc are commonly used in past narratives, but hic also links the present to the past in the course of a narrative, while ille, just as hic, also possesses a resuming function and denotes fictional or imagined referents, with ille also functioning as a contrastive localizer; (c) hic and iste are sometimes used as equivalents of is in its non expressive, neutral function and a similar compatibility is evident between hic, ibi (eo, inde) and illic (illuc, illinc), ibi (eo, inde) as well as in anaphoric sequences where is and ille are interchangeable; in terms of visibility, hic refers to persons and objects present during the enunciation, while ille denotes persons absent from the stage; (d) hic is associated with the speaker, while the anaphoric usage of iste, ista, istud relates to the interlocutor; (e) in cases of hyponymy, hypernymy, synonymy, metonymy and metaphor, P. employs the notion of an unfaithful anaphor (anaphore infidéle), in the sense that the anaphoric NP does not have the same semantic features as the referent NP.

Ch. 2 examines anaphoric usage with clauses, phrases and texts, and the concluding remarks are as follows: (a) id is the most apt lexeme in this type of anaphora, while hoc presents the more expanded resuming function; (b) with units of the first order (that is, objects, animals and persons observable by everybody) expressed through relatives id is again the appropriate pronoun in cases of anaphora, while with units of the second (situations spatio-temporally localized) or the third order (abstract notions) all pronouns may be employed; (c) adverbs also refer to discourse elements of a specific phrase or short subordinate clauses, while ita resumes longer texts; (d) anaphoric uses of the short-distance transphrastic type are the commonest. Ch. 3 deals with indirect anaphoric usages (in absentia of the referent); generic or associative anaphors lack co-referential links. Non co-referential anaphor largely depends on the utterance and its extra-linguistic context.

Part 2 is dedicated to cataphoric uses. In chs 4 and 5, P. examines cataphoric reference to clauses, phrases and texts through pronouns and adjectives as well as the cataphoric use of adverbs within a correlative system. Her main results may be summarized as follows: (a) in case of phrases or subordinate clauses (temporal, relative and restrictive), the object is the most common cataphoric element. The subsequent element of a cataphoric association usually denotes units of the second order; (b) in cases where the cataphoric element consists of a discontinuous NP, there is adjacency between the parts of the cataphoric association, with the subsequent part consisting of a relative clause, indirect question or an ut-sentence; (c) in case of correlative structures consisting in a NP correlative and a pronominal relative, the adjective of the nominal syntagm may be postponed, after the substantive; (d) in correlations with adverbs, what is expressed is a similarity or parallelism, cause, consequence, localization or spatial dislocation.

The final part, chs 6 and 7, focuses on deixis, with the following remarks: (a) elements of the type hic, hodie, hunc diem, antehac, etc. determine a priori the referent, in opposition to demonstrative adjectives and pronouns not showing or localizing the referent; (b) hic is the demonstrative of the first person, also denoting proximity, iste of the second and ille of the third and of an object/person located away. At the same time, however, hic denotes the relationship between a speaker and the object/person of whom/which he speaks; ille expresses a link established by a speaker between an object he speaks of and a third person, while iste establishes a link between a person or an object about whom/which a speaker talks and another person.

All things considered, the book is a useful, well-presented and well-written monograph, offering extensive and meticulously researched and classified material; what is more, copious indexes at the end are very helpful. On the down side, one cannot but regret the lack of engagement with non-French language literature on deixis, anaphora and demonstratives (for example, H. Diessel, Demonstratives: Form, Function and Grammaticalization (1999)), on the language of Plautus (for example, W. D. C. de Melo in E. Dickey and A. Chahoud (eds), Colloquial and Literary Latin, (2010), 71–99), as well as on the comparative and diachronic study of Latin demonstrative pronouns (for example, A. Stanvinschi, Diachronica 29 (2012), 72–97). Overall, this monograph is important and will be a reference book for decades to come.