The Modistic viewpoint

The major grammarian of antiquity, whose work formed the starting point for the Modistic Universal grammarians, was Priscian (6th century). His Institutiones gram- maticae comprise eighteen books and lean heavily on the Greek grammarian Apol- lonios Dyscolos’ work On syntax (second century ad). A contemporary of Priscian was Boethius, reckoned to be the last great logician of antiquity, who translated works of Aristotle such as the Categories and De interpretatione. Aristotle was perceived more as a logician than as a grammarian as well, since to some extent he had dealt with semantics, which Priscian had ignored, with the consequence that semantics and grammar were divorced.

A focal point in Priscian’s work is a system of ‘parts of speech’ (partes orationis), the number of which he identified, like Dionysios Thrax (ad 217–145) in his ‘art of grammar’ before him, as no less than eight. The parts of speech played (and play) a much lesser role in logic, where, as Aristotle’s De interpretatione (I–IV) teaches, the essential two elements of every proposition are the noun and the verb (playing the roles of subject and predicate, respectively), plus a connecting element, which

Aristotle identifies as grammatical Tense. In fact, as Covington (2009: 9) discusses, a systematic connection between logic and grammar had been lost by the time Priscian wrote. It was re-established gradually, however, from the eleventh century onwards, through the works of writers such as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142), and then in the twelfth century in the Priscian commentaries by William of Conches (1125) and his pupil Petrus Helias, which set the scene for the Modistae.

On the one hand, at this point, logic and grammar were re-united and recognized as dealing in some way with the same phenomena. On the other hand, it dawned on theorists that they were nonetheless doing so in quite different ways. It appears as if the deepest and most innovative insights were achieved in the course of a productive conflict between logical and grammatical points of view, with the parts of speech as one important dividing line between these. Thus, the author of the Dialectica Monacensis (early13th century: see de Rijk, 1967) notes that the logician has no use for more than two parts of speech (subject and predicate) since he is‘only concerned with relations between whole propositions’ (Covington, 2009: 11) and hence can take them for granted, not analysing their internal composition. The same reduction is noticeable in twentieth-century discussions in philosophical logic, where there is a similar austerity in descriptive vocabulary, as for example in the dualities between ‘singular’ vs ‘general’ propositions, or ‘referential’ vs ‘attribute’ expressions: none of these dualities map onto grammar in any precise way, where, as we will show in Chapter4, reference is a notion that rather requires a scale. A related difference in the ‘lens’ with which grammar is looked at transpires in the thought that the grammatical difference between subject and predicate maps onto the difference between ‘refer- ence’ and ‘generality’, or ‘objects’ and ‘properties’, understood as semantic notions. But clauses can be subjects (or at least topics), and predicates can lack generality (as in nominal Small Clauses: see Moro,1997).

Thefirst flickering of a novel grammatical interest and insight revolved around the multiplicity of the parts of speech, their exact definitions, and their rationales. Grammarians wondered why they exist, which they thought was a question to be answered byfinding out about their function. This is illustrated in Covington (2009: 9–10) with William of Conches (12th century), who complained about the obscurity of Priscian’s definitions of these parts, and in Petrus Helias’s query about what their functional explanations might be. We will raise and answer the same question in Chapter2. The search for functional explanations illustrates a concern with seman- tics that grammarians certainly had, despite the fact that‘semantics’ was primarily associated with logic, in this broadly Aristotelian tradition.

However, as just illustrated with Aristotle’s slimmed-down version of the parts of the speech, the grammarian’s interest in meaning, insofar as it depends on its finer articulation within the sentence or the internal organization of speech, is crucially different from the logician’s. In particular, it was clearly recognized that although the

grammarian cares for meaning, he does not care for the relation between words and the real-world objects they are used to refer to. For the same reason, truth (in the sense of what facts really obtain in the world) is also not the grammarian’s concern. Identifying the exact sense, therefore, in which grammatical meaning is a crucial concern of the linguistic theorist, while at the same time truth and reference are not, is very important for understanding the novel universal grammar paradigm that evolves in the middle and late13th century, as well as for re-conceptualizing universal grammar on the lines attempted here.

The productive conflict between logicians and grammarians we see in late Medi- eval Europe is strikingly similar to the one we have found above in the Indian tradition, where the struggle for the right meta-theoretical framework for philosophy and metaphysics divided the Nyayaikas (logicians) from the Vaiyakaranas (gram- marians, effectively Pāṇinians). The former are artha-pramanakah: ‘those who regard things and events as authority’: they were, as Matilal (1990: 42) puts it, ‘interested in the way the world is (or is supposed to be), not particularly in how people speak about it’. The grammarians on the other hand, are sabdapramanakah (sabda means‘word’): they are ‘those who regard speech patterns as authority’. As the post-Pāṇinian linguist Patanjali put it, they ‘accept the authority of the speech. What speech“tells” us is what we depend on (for deciding issues).’ From this point of view, to understand the way in which we know the world it is not irrelevant how we speak about it. On the contrary, it is a source of philosophical insight. For example, why can we say things like sthali pacati (‘the cauldron cooks’), when it is clear semantically that a cauldron is not a cook but that wherein he cooks? Is it just a confusion of grammar that‘John cooks’ and ‘The cauldron cooks’ look the same, indicating a mismatch between grammar and the logical structure of thought or the ontological structure of reality? The confusion disappears if we realize that being a ‘subject’ engaged in an action is not the same as being an‘agent’. Hence the cauldron, even in subject position, is not grammatically depicted as the thematic Agent—and nor as the undergoer or Patient (as which it would be the thing cooked). As the grammatical subject, it is rather involved (and in some sense actively) in the action of cooking the food inside it, which is what the speaker is here saying.17So the grammar gets this right. The identity of a cauldron as that of a physical object defined by, say, shape, size, and weight, is irrelevant to the grammarian—and it does not reflect the way in which we have natural knowledge of the world when we speak about things that cook.

Looked at in these terms, Chomsky’s (2000a) attacks on the philosophical notion of reference as applied to natural language is simply an instance of a grammarian’s insight that had dawned in human history twice before. Chomsky notes, for example,

17 _{Similar remarks apply to British weathermen speaking of‘many places struggling to see temperatures}

that a‘person’ such as Sylvester the baby donkey may well be turned into a rock by a witch, while the little girl who owns him tries to convince the world that it—the rock—is her baby donkey: physical criteria of individuation are irrelevant for how we refer to the world when we use language (Chomsky, 2009). In a similar vein, Chomsky (2000a: 37) notes that a city such as London can be destroyed and rebuilt 200 miles away, with people thinking of it as ‘the same city’, referring to it with the same name. So the way in which we refer to a city is not based on an individuation of such objects under a physical perspective. At the very least, a city is at a place, rather than a place.

However, twentieth-century philosophy and semantics has sided with logicians not the grammarians, and for the (mathematical) logician it is irrelevant how the world appears in the format of speech. Frege in particular was interested in the immutable laws of truth, ascribed to propositions in a Third Realm. Chomsky’s views on reference as inapplicable to natural language (see e.g. Ludlow, 2011; Antony and Hornstein, 2003) are the last instance of a continuing struggle to tell logic and grammar apart. The same problem mars work on ‘thematic roles’ (Agent, Theme, Goal, Instrument, etc.), which are in part semantically individuated, without leaving any grammatical reflex.18 If the list gets too long, their identification depends on mixing grammatical and logical or conceptual criteria for them, which is to say: grammatical and logical semantics.

It does not follow from the above, on the other hand, that truth and reference have no role to play in the theory of grammar. Indeed, as stressed earlier, both Indian and Modistic grammarians had a systematic concern with meaning, unlike structural or generative linguistics. This illustrates our claim that a clear-cut and principled notion of grammatical meaning remains to be developed, giving a rationale for grammar itself. Crucial to the Modistic attempt to provide such a rationale was a novel theory of the parts of speech. Lying at the heart of Modistic grammar, they are probably one of the least developed aspects of generative linguistic theory, where they play essentially no role in syntax at all and there is little theory of them, as Baker (2003) notes. X-bar theory, Minimalist Merge, and phase theory all abstract from (or generalize over) their distinctions, or postulate them as part of a universal set of innate (perhaps internally decomposed) ‘features’. Generative typology is criticized for taking such features as universally available and instantiated, a priori primitives (Haspelmath,2010). For the Modists, by contrast, grammar begins with the emergence of a system of parts of speech, and without a theory of the latter, there is no theory of grammar. Such a theory cannot come from Merge/recursion in the Minimalist sense, which is generic and found in all sorts of discretely infinite domains in nature. Nor can it come from the lexicon, if the latter is pregrammatical (see also Boeckx,2010, and Chapter 2).

18 _{Hale and Keyser (2002) is an attempt to constrain this number by identifying thematic roles with a}

Generative grammar—rightly from a grammarian’s point of view—has distanced itself from (logical) semantics: it is not concerned with what is true or false, like whether water is H2O, or whether peanuts are inanimate. Whether the phonological

word sounding‘water’ is used to refer to H₂O depends on historically contingent facts like whether or not we have been abducted overnight and wake up on a planet called Twin Earth where what looks to us like water happens to be XYZ (Putnam, 1973). As for peanuts, it is in the power of grammar to make them animate, if we tell a narrative in which two little peanuts fell in love (Nieuwland and Van Berkum,2006). But the generative tradition has remained sufficiently attached to the formal view- point of logic to relegate semantics to an autonomous‘semantic component’, and to not perceive parts of speech distinctions as central to the organization of grammar. It rather tried to reduce the last two remaining Aristotelian parts of speech, subject and predicate, to formal or ‘configurational’ notions (phrase structure): not only could logicians thus do without (much of ) grammar, but grammatical theory, or so it appeared, could, too.19While reducing ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ to grammatical notions would at least make them grammatical, parts of speech in the sense of nouns and verbs are essentially treated as formal features entering the syntactic process as primitives, hence as lexical.

Recent developments in Minimalist syntax have continued the traditional trend. Pietroski (2011), in particular, when identifying the ‘minimal semantic instructions’ that the grammar gives to the semantic component, makes no reference to any parts of speech, including even the Aristotelian template of subject and predicate. As he shows, to obtain a logic or semantics one does not need subjects and (sentential) predicates. All one needs is (monadic) predicates and a way of conjoining them, plus some relevant adjustments for thematic roles, and a closure operation (existential quantification as in the Neo-Davidsonian framework). The implication is that, if these are what the grammar minimally‘tells’ the semantics, semantics does not need to know about parts of speech: they are semantically inert. Ipso facto, semantics will not know about grammatical meaning, which is reflected in part of speech distinc- tions, and logic and semantics will not illuminate semantic distinctions, if any, that depend on grammar. It follows that, either, grammatical meaning does not exist—as nominalist logicians in the fourteenth century concluded, bringing down the Mod- istic enterprise—or it does, in which case semantics as so construed will not touch upon what is linguistically specific and requires grammar (and Bhartrihari would have been wrong when he claimed that word and meaning relate as cause and effect). What, then, did the Modists have to say about the parts of speech that has escaped generative theorizing in the twentieth century? Their innovation is embedded in an

19 _{Moro (1997) argues against this trend and proposes that the notions of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ are not}

only independent of the notions of ‘noun’ and ‘verb’, thus providing no analysis for them, but are grammatical primitives crucial to syntactic analysis.

explicit reflection on what it takes for grammar to be a science (scientia) rather than the art (ars) that it had been in the Western world until the twelfth century. As an art, grammar is taught as a means to speak better Latin. As a science, by contrast, it aims at truth, and indeed it has to uncover necessary truths, which obtain universally in a particular domain of inquiry. Yet universality as such is not the essential issue here, insofar as things can be universal without having any force of necessity. Enumerating linguistic universals empirically is thus no contribution to grammar as science in the Modistic sense. They need to follow fromfirst principles, which should apply to all languages. Since languages vary, a need arises to distinguish dimensions wherein variation is inessential from a core where languages are the same.

Such a core arguably must exist: the linguistic ability and grammatical organiza- tion as such are species-universal. So we need to determine what these consist in. There are not two human species, a linguistic and a non-linguistic one; or one whose grammatical ability linguistic theory captures, while there is another that requires a completely different theory. So whatever grammatical theory we wish to develop, it needs to capture a biological property that defines a species and sets its boundary (Crow,2002a). The search for necessary truths, too, appears barely controversial in contemporary terms: in a science such as physics we don’t want it to be an accident how objects move (as long as idealized circumstances obtain). The Modistic view- point therefore simply means that the internal organization of language is not an accident or an arbitrary convention either. Using the Aristotelian distinction between the practical and theoretical (=‘speculative’) sciences, grammar thought of in these terms is thus scientia speculativa, which does not aim at action or at changing how people behave, but at truth.

On the other hand, precisely the parts of speech do not seem to be universal, and it is even unclear what they are, and how many they are. How then can we turn grammar into a scientific domain? The proposal of Chomsky has been to study language as a‘natural object’, ‘a real object of the natural world‘ (Chomsky, 1995: 11), identified as a purely formal structure, arbitrarily interpreted, which is then embedded in a number of performance systems, hence viewed much as the formal symbols of a logical language. This is not only what naturalism in the study of grammar has come to mean, but is also in concord with what twentieth-century philosophical naturalists would accept a naturalistic account of grammar to be: for philosophical naturalism precisely struggles with the integration of meaning into the natural world, regarding intensions in particular as‘creatures of darkness’ (Quine, 1956). No engagement with such creatures is required if grammar consists in the manipulation, by formal rules, of physically individuated symbols encoding various ‘features’ of language. This object of study, as is appropriate for a natural object, is then equally deprived of normative aspects. In line with this, Davidson (2004: 131–3) argues that an account of language cannot be fully naturalistic because it is inherently normative; but this does

not affect Chomskyan generative grammar as a naturalistic enterprise, he argues, for that enterprise simply doesn’t bear upon meaning—and it can be naturalistic, as claimed by Chomsky, precisely for this reason.

Naturalism in this sense is exactly not the avenue on which the Modists sought to reveal the essential nature of language and turn it into an object of science. On the contrary, the essential move consisted in the claim that every word, in addition to pronunciation and meaning, has a set of properties called modi significandi (modes of signifying), with (speculative) grammar defined as the study of these. A science of language, the idea was, must start from a principled identification and classification of these modi, which can be combined in a way that is again not due to semantic reasons and distinctive of this particular system. For example, Socrates and philoso- pher combined does not merely yield Socrates, philosopher (except in apposition). Rather, it can yield something where a specific relation between the two is grammat- ically specified, yielding a new object with a completely different mode of signifying, as in Socrates is a philosopher (Covington,2009: 26, 32).

The modi in question must also define the parts of this peculiar system, which the Modists took to be the parts of speech that much of grammatical theory since antiquity had been about. But now, a principled explanation for these had to be found—one couldn’t just enumerate them, as Priscian had done. They should form an ordo naturalis, a natural order governed by some principle. Now, clearly, words have two kinds of properties, sound (vox) and (lexical) meaning. But sound is arbitrary and hence cannot form the basis of a science of language. Neither can the word-forms and their derivations (morphology), which differ radically across lan- guages, as was clear to the Modists from even a cursory look at Greek and Latin. So there must be some other properties that words have and that form the basis of a ‘universal’ grammar. Since, on the Modistic view, the basis of language is significa- tion, it makes sense to look for universals right there. This is where the modes of signification, as special new properties postulated for words, come in. They define the