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This worksheet by Robin Meyer offers the following sentence as an example of a nominativus cum infinitivo:

Parentes adire ad filios prohibentur. (Cic. Ver. 2.5, 117)
Parents were prohibited to see their children.

As I understand this, though, adire ad filios is the complement of prohibentur, just as in the English translation. That would mean that parentes adire ad filios is not a nominativus cum infinitivo. This might be clearer if we reorder the words:

Parentes prohibentur adire ad filios.

I looked up the passage in the Loeb library and found that the full original sentence has this same word order (with the subject parentes implied):

Includuntur in carcerem condemnati; supplicium constituitur in illos, sumitur de miseris parentibus nauarchorum; prohibentur adire ad filios, prohibentur liberis suis cibum vestitumque ferre.
The condemned men were thrust into prison, and the agonies decreed for them were exacted forthwith from their hapless parents, who were forbidden access to their sons, forbidden to bring their own children food and clothing. (Translation by L.H.G. Greenwood.)

So, is adire here just a plain old infinitive complement to another verb?


I was led to this example by this answer from Asteroides, pointed out in this comment by Joonas Ilmavirta, in response to my own apparent misuse of the nominativus cum infinitivo.

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As I understand this, though, adire ad filios is the complement of prohibentur, just as in the English translation.

Yes.

That would mean that parentes adire ad filios is not a nominativus cum infinitivo.

As far as I can tell, nominativus cum infinitivo is used to refer to examples like this. There is a German Wikipedia article Nominativus cum infinitivo that gives examples like "Caesar in Gallia vicisse dicitur."

The only variation that I know of is that the nominative noun may be either the subject of the sentence, or in the case where the infinitive is esse, the nominative noun may be the predicative complement (which here, as elsewhere, is regularly put in the same case as the subject, whether the subject is explicit or implicit—in the case of "nominativus cum infinitivo", the relevant subject is the subject of the entire clause). Esse + a predicative noun or adjective in the nominative case does form a constituent.

But aside from this case, which occurs in clauses where esse + nominative predicate acts as the complement of a finite catenative verb with a nominative subject, I know of no circumstances where the Latin nominative forms a constituent with an infinitive.

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