Si les penseurs anciens s’accordaient pour dire que les mots reçoivent leur signification d’une institution, leurs vues divergeaient, en revanche, quant à la question de savoir jusqu’à quel point leurs instituteurs étaient libres de choisir tels ou tels sons pour désigner telle ou telle chose. Il ne fait pas de doute que, pour les Stoïciens, ceux qui ont imposés les noms visaient d’ordinaire à créer des expressions linguistiques capables d’évoquer d’une certaine manière les choses signifiées. L’article rejette cependant l’idée que (...) les Stoïciens présupposaient une situation initiale où l’ensemble des termes d’une langue donnée étaient parfaitement adaptés à leur fonction, les aberrations ou anomalies du langage ordinaire étant liées à une dégradation progressive de conditions de départ idéales. Ils pensaient, au contraire, que l’imposition des mots est un processus continu, que les locuteurs ordinaires entretiennent pour des raisons essentiellement utilitaires ; processus qui n’est que partiellement réglé par leur rationalité commune. Ce qui explique pourquoi le Grec qu’ils se trouvaient parler présentait à leurs yeux un défaut de systématicité que les Stoïciens se sont dès lors appliqués à corriger par le biais d’une nomenclature qui se voulait rigoureuse et cohérente. (shrink)

Si les penseurs anciens s’accordaient pour dire que les mots reçoivent leur signification d’une institution (θέσις), leurs vues divergeaient, en revanche, quant à la question de savoir jusqu’à quel point leurs instituteurs étaient libres de choisir tels ou tels sons pour désigner telle ou telle chose. Il ne fait pas de doute que, pour les Stoïciens, ceux qui ont imposés les noms visaient d’ordinaire à créer des expressions linguistiques capables d’évoquer d’une certaine manière les choses signifiées. L’article rejette cependant l’idée (...) que les Stoïciens présupposaient une situation initiale où l’ensemble des termes d’une langue donnée étaient parfaitement adaptés à leur fonction, les aberrations ou anomalies du langage ordinaire étant liées à une dégradation progressive de conditions de départ idéales. Ils pensaient, au contraire, que l’imposition des mots est un processus continu, que les locuteurs ordinaires entretiennent pour des raisons essentiellement utilitaires ; processus qui n’est que partiellement réglé par leur rationalité commune. Ce qui explique pourquoi le Grec qu’ils se trouvaient parler présentait à leurs yeux un défaut de systématicité que les Stoïciens se sont dès lors appliqués à corriger par le biais d’une nomenclature qui se voulait rigoureuse et cohérente. (shrink)

Whatever one may think of Schmidt’s intuition, it is still nothing but intuition, and the variety of syntactic structures which εἶναι admits of is neither articulated nor unified. Kahn, on the other hand, by the use of Transformational Grammar, is able to a large extent to generate in a regular way from a posited notion of "kernel sentence" all the Greek sentences in which εἶναι occurs. Kahn’s original plan was "to correlate every intuitive difference of meaning in the use (...) of εἰμί with a formal description of the corresponding sentence-type", but he admits that he cannot always do so. Whether this is a failure inherent in Transformational Grammar itself, or in the version Kahn uses, can for the moment be left aside. First, an example of the success and another of the failure of the technique, as Kahn practices it, are in order. Kahn formulates the rule for the recognition of periphrasis somewhat as follows: εἶναι is used periphrastically with the participle if and only if it is impossible to obtain two kernel sentences, one of which has a finite form of εἶναι and the other a finite form of the participle, but if two kernel sentences can be so obtained, the usage is not periphrastic. This rule is both simple and elegant; it will no doubt become in time a standard part of Greek grammar. The enchantment, however, which mathematical clarity can cast is best illustrated in the case of another construction. ἔστιν ὅστις... is not uncommon. It looks like the existential operator of modern logic, and the fact that it occurs far more often with οὐκ than without seems to be, linguistically, irrelevant. Now, Kahn asserts that, though he looked hard for examples, he could only find one in which the second clause has the copula, and he offers a proof as to why this should be the case. He is mistaken. Euripides has οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν ὅστις ἕστ’ ἐλεύθερος, and Sophocles καὶ οὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς, and there are several examples in just one passage of Plato’s Charmides. The Sophoclean example is important since it illustrates a double "zeroing" of εἶναι, and whereas for traditional grammar such nominal sentences are treated as primary, with the insertion of ἐστί as a secondary development, in Kahn’s use of Transformational Grammar no distinction between the presence or the absence of the verb can be allowed. For deep structure, the verb is always present, and it might be no more than an apparent paradox that a verb, whose primitive meaning is said to designate presence, can in its absence make its presence equally felt. Can a verb which is almost always eliminable be the word for reality and truth? Or is it because "being" is the only word that cannot be just a word that it can so easily be suppressed in speech? (shrink)

Clashes between bits of non-homogeneous theories inherited from antiquity were an important factor in the formation of medieval theories in logic and grammar, but the traditional categories of Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism are not quite adequate to describe the situation. Neoplatonism is almost irrelevant in logic and grammar, while there might be reasons to introduce a new category, LAS = Late Ancient Standard, with two branches: logical LAS = Aristotle + Boethius, and grammatical LAS = Stoics &c. (...) → Apollonius → Priscian. (shrink)

Introduction By the late fifth century BCE Panini had composed the Astadhyayi, consisting of nearly 4000 rules giving a precise and fairly complete ...

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context of earlier, including (...) class='Hi'>ancient, developments. The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Anderson examines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions between meaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language. (shrink)

Gennaro Chtjerchia, Dynamics of meaning: anaphora, presupposition, and the the of grammar. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.xv+ 270 pp, £59.95, £31.95 G. Pr...

We introduce _Interleave-Disjunction-Lock parallel multiple context-free grammars_ (IDL-PMCFG), a novel grammar formalism designed to describe the syntax of free word order languages that allow for extensive interleaving of grammatical constituents. Though interleaved constituents, and especially the so-called hyperbaton, are common in several ancient (Classical Latin and Greek, Sanskrit...) and modern (Hungarian, Finnish...) languages, these syntactic structures are often difficult to express in existing formalisms. The IDL-PMCFG formalism combines Seki et al.’s parallel multiple context-free grammars (PMCFG) with Nederhof and (...) Satta’s IDL expressions. We define the semantics of IDL-PMCFGs and study their expressivity, proving that IDL-PMCFG extends both PMCFG and IDL-CFG (context-free grammars equipped with IDL expressions) and that IDL-PMCFG parsing is \(\mathrm {NP}\) -hard. We then introduce COMPĀ, a programming language extending Ranta’s Grammatical Framework (GF) and built as a high-level front-end formalism to IDL-PMCFG for practical grammar development. We present a parsing algorithm for IDL-PMCFG inspired by earlier Earley-style PMCFG parsing algorithms and Nederhof and Satta’s IDL graphs and give a worst-case estimate of its complexity as a function of several metrics on IDL expressions, the size of the input and a new notion of the _G_-density of a language. (shrink)

A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. By John L. Hays. Aids and Research Tools in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, vol. 5. 3rd ed. Malibu, CA: unDena publications, 2018. Pp. vi + 579. $50.

This third Companion To Ancient Thought is devoted to ancient theories of language. The chapters range over more than eight hundred years of philosophical enquiry, and provide critical analyses of all the principal accounts of how it is that language can have meaning and how we can come to acquire linguistic understanding. The discussions move from the naturalism examined in Plato's Cratylus to the sophisticated theories of the Hellenistic schools and the work of St Augustine. The relations between (...) thought about language and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the development of grammar are also explored. (shrink)

This article introduces the reader to the issue of verbal sequence in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible, a topic that was studied in depth as a doctoral dissertation. After noticing the peculiarities of the poetic discourse, it surveys the solutions offered to this crux interpretum to date, but concludes that these solutions are insufficient. Several limitations of such a study are assumed from the outset. We confine ourselves to the Psalter for various reasons given below. Terminologically, we resist the (...) temptation of modern terminology by making use of terms that are as neutral as possible. Methodologically, we employ Systemic Functional Grammar to describe the grammatical incidents wherein verbs are included. Lastly, the paper concludes with an overview of the potential contributions of such a study. (shrink)

Boethius, the Roman philosopher, was executed for treason and pilloried by modern scholars for misinterpreting Aristotle to the West. This book examines his semantics and logic, attempting to clear his name and lend him new credence.

When dealing with manuscripts transmitting otherwise unknown ancient texts and without a subscriptio, the work of a philologist and literary critic becomes both more difficult and more engrossing. Definitive proof is impossible; at the end there can only be a hypothesis. When dealing with a unique grammatical text, such a hypothesis becomes even more delicate because of the standardization of ancient grammar. But it can happen that, behind crystallized theoretical argumentation and apparently canonical formulas, interstices can be (...) explored that lead to unforeseen possibilities, more exciting—and even more suitable—than those that have already emerged. (shrink)

Good things come to those who wait. In this case, the waiting period was just a bit shy of the amount of time that the ancient Israelites had to spend in the desert before entering the Promised Land. But now, over thirty years after the appearance of the first volume of Edwin Curley's English edition of the "collected works" of Spinoza—and almost fifty years since the signing of the original contract with Princeton University Press—we have been magnificently rewarded. Volume (...) 2 is, like its predecessor, a major scholarly achievement; something for which we should all be grateful.1 The second volume, which contains the Theological-Political Treatise, the Political Treatise, and the remainder of the correspondence... (shrink)

The goal Kahn sets for himself in this impressive and important book is "to give an account of the ordinary, nontechnical uses of the Greek verb [eimi]... by dealing extensively with the earliest evidence and by referring to parallel evidence in cognate languages" so as to "make this a study of the Indo-European verb be". He uses a modified version of Zellig Harris’ transformational grammar for analyzing the copula, existential and veridical uses of the verb be in Chs. IV, (...) VI, and VII, which are the core of the book and which will be of special interest to students of linguistics. Ch. II on the concepts of subject and predicate, Ch. V on the general theory of be as copula, and Ch. VIII on the conceptual unity between the multiple uses of be are geared "for readers whose interest is primarily philosophical.". (shrink)

The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers and artists, where the depiction of the social world gave way to an (...) exploration of states of being. The paradigm for that turn inward in modern art was set by the artist Kadhim Haidar, in a series of paintings exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, in 1965, under the title The Epic of the Martyr [Malḥamat al-shahīd]. The paintings reconstructed imagery from the mourning processions that annually commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al-Husayn. This paper argues that the ritual imagery contains a grammar of experience, forged in the early history of Islam, that linked justice to a state of being, and that the transposition of the imagery into painting activated that grammar in the artwork. (shrink)