This dissertation, devoted to hyperbaton in Latin, is divided into three chapters. The aim of chapter I is to examine the concept of hyperbaton used by Roman rhetoricians grammarians. It shows that this term is used in two distinct ways. Firstly, hyperbaton in the narrow sense covers anastrophe and transiectio, i.e. a discontinuous phrase, especially a discontinuous noun phrase. Secondly, Roman grammarians conceive hyperbaton in a broad sense for designating five types of inversion of word order. Furthermore, Julian of Toledo adds a type of “long hyperbaton”, i.e. long inserted parentheses. The first part of chapter II provides an overview of reflections about hyperbaton in philological and linguistic literature. Hyperbaton is traditionally regarded as a stylistic figure; however, Modern studies on this topic focus on pragmatic implication of the use of discontinuous phrases. The second part of chapter II presents the concept of framing and median field (sequence of inserted words), developed by German linguistics. Chapter III provides a typology of words inserted into a discontinuous noun phrase formed by a genitive and its head noun. Attention is paid to the order in which inserted elements are linearised. The research is based on a corpus of discontinuous noun phrases collected mainly in Caesar, Cicero, and Historia Augusta. The median field can be formed by various words or groups of words. Examples of median fields with two, three, and more words and their ordering are presented in synoptic tables.
