Page 497 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

The period from about 350 BCto 150BC was perhaps the most productive for Greek linguistics. In the case of Aristotle, there exists a substantial portion of his writings preserved in manuscript; for all the others, including the Academy, Epicurus, and the Stoics, as well as the various scholarly writers associated with Alexandria and Pergamon, there remain only frag- ments, summaries, and comments preserved in later writings (often in two or more steps: 'Sextus Empiricus quotes Chares quoting Crates,' for instance). But, for- tunately, the fragments of the Stoics are sufficient to give an excellent idea of their linguistic teachings. And, like Aristotle, they approach language from a philosophical, logical perspective.
1. Aristotle
Aristotle's linguistic output falls into two parts, one represented especially by chapters 19-22 of the Poetics (1456a-1459a), but also four paragraphs elsewhere (Rhetoric III, 5,1407b; Prior Analytics I, 36,48b-^9a; and Sophistical Refutations 14, 173b-174a and 32, 182a-b); the other by the Categories and the de Inter- pretatione. The former items seem to contain sub- stantially the standard analysis presented in the grammatike of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, much like what is seen in Plato, while the latter represent Aristotle's own original research.
In the Poetics are three of the recurring linguistic topics of antiquity: (a) sentence-types or illocutionary forces (question, command, statement, etc.); (b) parts of speech (Aristotle does not here use the expression meros tou logou, but lists sundesmos, onoma, rhSma, arthrori); and (c) the four transformations (addition, deletion, substitution, and transposition—here used for the derivation of poetic words from ordinary ones). There is also a clear anticipation of the pattern of later technai (grammatical sketches like Dionysius Thrax's): first a list of some technical terms (providing a table of contents), then definitions, subclassification, and discussion of each in turn, then, in the Poetics,a
further subclassification of nouns and their inflections. The most interesting additions to Plato's treatment of phonology is the mention of voiced stops, shapes of the mouth, places (of articulation), and aspiration (a brief treatment, but basically better than in Dionysius Thrax). He treats tense, mood, case, and number in 1457a 17-22 (all called ptosis), but gender in 1458a 8- 17, since it is not an inflection (for nouns, at least), but an inherent property, partly signaled, in the nomi- native, by the final consonant or vowel. His only way ofnamingthecasesiswiththeformsofhoutos ('this'): toutou means 'genitive case,' toutoi 'dative,' etc. This usage recurs in Prior Analytics 4-9a 1-5 and Soph. Refut. 182a 32-b3 and 173b 26-37. It is interesting that Panini sometimes uses the same device. Aristotle in some of these places uses it to indicate gender, though he knows the three Protagorean names also, and sometimes uses metaxu 'between' for the neuter.
The interesting addition in these last three passages and in the Rhetoric one (1407b) is what seems to be the standard fifth-century treatment of syntax. It is introduced under the heading of solecism (a word first attested in this sense in Herodotus 4.117.1). While there is only one word for correct Greek, 'hellenism,' there are two for errors: 'barbarism,' which includes all errors of pronunciation, spelling, inflectional mor- phology, and vocabulary choice, and 'solecism,' which means any error in syntax. In particular it refers to errors of agreement in gender, number (or case), of case government, and apparently certain instances of word-order and semantics (Rhetoric 1407b 6-7). The rules implied in these four passages are the following:
(a) correlative conjunctions (like men and de) should be made to correspond (and at a reason- able distance);
(b) each word should be placed so that its syn- tactical connection is unambiguous (remember the hyperbaton in Plato's Protagoras 343F);
(c) participles and adjectives must agree with the nouns they modify in case, gender, and number;
SECTION IX Key Figures
a) Pre-20th Century
Aristotle and the Stoics F. W. Householder'
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