Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 2, Issue 1, 1975

The Absoluta is a Summa on Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, Books XVII-XVIII, which deal with syntax, so called from its opening word. The author was probably Petrus Hispanus, who is otherwise unknown. The work was presumably written in Paris in the third quarter of the 12th century. It survives in 14 manuscripts spread widely over Europe, and dating from ca. 1200 to the 14th century. The same author perhaps wrote a Summa on Priscian, Books I-XVI, known also from its opening words as Strenuum negotiatorem, of which only a fragment of the beginning survives in a single manuscript. In the Absoluta the author follows the order of treatment of subjects in Priscian, but proceeds chiefly by raising questions on doubtful points. He emphatically distinguishes the tasks of the grammarian and of the dialectician, yet makes much use of the methods of the latter. Thus, in the discussion of the case to be used after the verb substantive, the rule is propounded and argued on logical grounds. His theoretical framework is that of the Summa of Petrus Helias (mid-12th cent.), which he uses freely, and though he makes some advances, as in the use of the term modus significandi and of the concept of suppositio, he is still at the stage where they do not bear their later technical sense.

This article presents a linguistic study of a number of 12th-century logical tracts with respect to their views on fallacies of composition and division. It will be seen that early Scholastic work done in this area was greatly influenced by certain syntactic properties of Latin.The correlation between meaning and syntactic order came to preoccupy logicians upon the rediscovery and subsequent translation of Aristotle's De Sophisticis Elenchis at the beginning of the 12th century. Some logicians of the period felt that a composite syntactic* order correlated obligatorily with a composite sense; others thought that order and sense could be independent from each other, and that, consequently, a composite syntactic order could have two readings, a composite one and a divided one. A third opinion expressed was that certain syntactic orders received two interpretations, one considered to be normal (a composite order correlating preferentially with a composite sense), and another one regarded as secondary (the possibility for a composite order to be understood in a divided sense as well).The ideas which found expression in the 12th century manuscripts discussed in this study influenced logical speculation throughout the Scholastic period.

The 1587 edition of Sanctius' Minerva was not the first edition: a 1562 version has recently been discovered. This paper outlines Sanctius' linguistic theory as it is advanced in the earlier version and traces its evolution. Some aspects of Sanctius' system are briefly considered with relation to his immediate predecessors Linacre, Scaliger, and Ramus. I attempt to show that the basic tenets of his theory are already present in the early work: his conception of grammar, the importance of his logical rules (rationes), and his abstract notion of ellipsis as an essential mechanism for positing underlying structures and general rules, as well as for explaining obscure syntactic constructions. His views on the noun and the constructio of nouns, on verbs and the constructio of verbs are presented in an effort to show his evolution towards a more simple and general system of language. No attempt is made to cover those aspects of his theory which appear only in the later Minerva.

Of a Habilitationsschrift in progress, supported by a fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg