Drop-In Hours

Monday 12:00-1:00 pm and Thursday 1:00-3:00 pm in 24N Phillips Hall

About

Matthew DeHass has earned a BA and MA in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Missouri – Columbia (MU) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Classics. Matthew is interested in how we can leverage the large digital corpus of Latin literature to make new discoveries about the language, particularly variation across registers and authors. The increased interest in incorporating spoken Latin in K-12 classrooms makes it a desirable goal to understand Latin as it was used in informal communication and outside the highly refined style of Caesar or the Augustan poets. Additionally, understanding the connotations of phrases and vocabulary is impossible without native speaker intuitions (how could a German learner know that obsiegen sounds more formal or dramatic than siegen?). Computers allow us to uncover these unconscious patterns in a language whose last native speakers died before the Islamic conquest. Just as the Pompeiian inscriptions were an important source for verifying the authenticity of non-standard Latin in Petronius, corpus linguistics gives us a way to interrogate less immediately obvious aspects of the style, vocabulary, and usage of different registers.

Matthew’s most recent project is a collaboration with a historian at the University of Wisconsin on the Caesarian corpus. The linguistic features he studies are commonly used in authorship verification, so he is working to bring this knowledge to bear on the issue of authorship on the whole Caesarian corpus, not only controversial segments such as the Bellum Alexandrinum.

Matthew has also presented his work four times at conferences. Twice he has presented to his peers at MU’s Eugene Lane Occasional Papers symposium, first on the Roman grammatical tradition and second on the topic of his master’s thesis, Parataxis in Latin Colloquial and Poetic Texts: a treebank-based analysis. The small scope of the topic, parataxis, made a focused study possible and highlighted the value of current annotated corpora for studying less formal Latin texts. He presented on the same topic at CAMWS in 2024 and returned in 2026 with a talk titled Plebeius Sermo: A Corpus Study of Cicero’s Letter’s to Atticus.

When he is not applying himself to these subjects, Matthew is glad to talk about his time teaching middle school Latin and reminiscing about his most frequent lessons, which were probably, “no, don’t put that on your arm,” and “that pencil does not go in your neighbor’s ear.”