D.A. Russell’s An Anthology of Latin Prose includes as its fifth selection a passage from Book 4 of the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, in which we have “the earliest systematic treatment of style (elocutio).” It is here that the discussion of the grand, middle, and plain styles begins. 4.11 opens thus:
Sunt igitur tria genera, quae genera nos figuras appellamus.
“There are therefore three kinds, which (kinds) we call styles.”
The reader will have noticed that the antecedent of the relative clause is repeated within the relative clause. Russell give a note referring to Gildersleeve & Lodge 615, which informs us in a note that “[t]his usage belongs to the formal style of government and law” (incidentally, Panuis says the same thing in 369). So: given that this is found at the opening of a systematic treatment of style, and is presumably prescriptive as well as descriptive, do we have here an intentional imitation of legal diction as a sort of implicit appeal to authority (or, perhaps better, as a way of giving a subtle veneer of authority)?
If so, we have a nice illustration of the point that grammar matters. If we were to get a sense of what the Latin says–a kind of first-order understanding–but not stop to puzzle over why the antecedent is repeated and check around for an explanation (thanks, D.A. Russell; I probably wouldn’t have checked around otherwise), we might miss an aspect of the text that is semantically important but can only be seen in the syntactical structure of the sentence.