order of demonstratives

Latin Learning Latin
1

Hi all. I have a query about sentences of the following shape:

sed calor hic urit.

Would a Roman understand this to mean, ‘but this heat burns’ or ‘but the heat burns here’?

Imagine the Latin was writ in verse, such that the poet could not have placed ‘hic’ before ‘calor’ without losing ‘sed’. I would have thought that ‘hic’ tends to amplify the word it precedes, hence my initial instinct to take it adverbially with ‘urit’, but a brief flick through the Oxford Latin syntax does not confirm. It proximity to both blurs the question.

What does textkit say? What the scholarship?

2

In verse it could equally well be taken either way, and only context would determine which.
In prose, my sense is that hic in “calor hic urit” would be less likely to be taken as adjectival than in “hic calor urit”, though again it would very much depend on the context.