Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Images and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Where is Medieval Pragmatics?
- 1 Medieval Pragmatics: Philosophical and Grammatical Contexts
- 2 Interjections: Does Affect have Grammar
- 3 Allas Context
- 4 Alisoun’s Giggle, or the Miller Does Pragmatics
- 5 How Heretics Talk, According to Bernard Gui and William Thorpe
- 6 Margery Kempe’s Strategic Vague Language
- One More Thing
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Medieval Pragmatics: Philosophical and Grammatical Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Images and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Where is Medieval Pragmatics?
- 1 Medieval Pragmatics: Philosophical and Grammatical Contexts
- 2 Interjections: Does Affect have Grammar
- 3 Allas Context
- 4 Alisoun’s Giggle, or the Miller Does Pragmatics
- 5 How Heretics Talk, According to Bernard Gui and William Thorpe
- 6 Margery Kempe’s Strategic Vague Language
- One More Thing
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter discusses grammar and pragmatic thinking in the schools after 1050, focusing on internal history and semiotics. Roger Bacon and Peter (of) John Olivi proposed far-reaching theories of language and meaning with pragmatic perspectives. Bacon foregrounded pragmatic understanding in his semiotics of language and proposed context and communicative effectiveness rather than formal completion as the criteria for linguistic acceptability. Grammarians’ analysis of interjections, speech fragments, and emotional expressions opened new ways of understanding meaning-making, discursive interaction, and double articulation within a grammatical system and new pragmatic thinking about signification, reference, and affect. Olivi's pragmatic approaches to some philosophical and theological accounts of language and expression focused on speakers’ and listeners’ responsibilities and how words’ meanings and contexts can change over time.
Keywords: actus significatus, actus exercitus, affectus, conceptus, Roger Bacon, Peter John Olivi, sign theory
After 1050 CE, medieval philosophers and grammarians used the traditional vocabulary and concepts of Latin grammatica as well as metalanguage and concepts derived from Aristotle and Augustine to describe and theorize language in structural and pragmatic ways. They never used the word pragmatikē or a Latin or vernacular cognate, but grammarians and philosophers reworked existing metalanguage, concepts, and theories to produce two new approaches to grammar and language. One theory, associated with the grammatica speculativa and related general philosophical grammar, adopted a framework based on Aristotle's causes to develop a theory of autonomous language according to the modi of being, understanding, and signifying. The modistae focused on the four orders of syntax: natural, grammatically obligatory, rhetorical, and logical (Kneepkens 1990). They sought to explain logical order, rather than word order, and congruitas with respect to semantic relations, much as modern generative and dependency grammars do. The other theoretical approach, which never really gained a name, combined Aristotle's account of language and mind with Augustine's theory of language and signs to confect a more functional perspective on communication and language in use. Aspects of medieval functional theories anticipate current pragmatic and functionalist theories of language and social interaction. In this chapter I discuss pragmatic thinking in mostly thirteenth-century philosophy of language with special attention to the work of Roger Bacon (OFM, 1214/1219-c. 1292) and Peter (of) John Olivi (OFM, 1248-1298). In Chapter 2 I zero in on a productive and provocative aspect of medieval grammatical and pragmatic theory, grammarians’ analyses of the interjection and ellipsis as meaningful language use outside explicitly logical order.
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- Information
- The Medieval Life of LanguageGrammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe, pp. 31 - 84Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021