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The Modistae: Grammar and Signification

The modistae were medieval grammarians who wrote "Treatises Concerning the Modes of Signifying" and made two major contributions to the development of grammar. First, they insisted on explicating the distinctions between categories and parts of speech that had been established by earlier Greek and Roman grammarians. Second, they viewed grammar as its own separate discipline rather than just a part of other fields of study. They explored fundamental questions about the nature and basis of language, signification, and grammar that still interest linguists today. While they worked within the limited categories available to them, the modistae's broad conception of grammar and subtle syntactic observations would provide valuable insights for modern linguistic discussions.

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Aprilia Kartika Putri
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55 views2 pages

The Modistae: Grammar and Signification

The modistae were medieval grammarians who wrote "Treatises Concerning the Modes of Signifying" and made two major contributions to the development of grammar. First, they insisted on explicating the distinctions between categories and parts of speech that had been established by earlier Greek and Roman grammarians. Second, they viewed grammar as its own separate discipline rather than just a part of other fields of study. They explored fundamental questions about the nature and basis of language, signification, and grammar that still interest linguists today. While they worked within the limited categories available to them, the modistae's broad conception of grammar and subtle syntactic observations would provide valuable insights for modern linguistic discussions.

Uploaded by

Aprilia Kartika Putri
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© All Rights Reserved
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Certainly the most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this period is

contained in the “speculative grammar” of the modistae, who were so called because
the titles of their works were often phrased De modis significandi tractatus (“Treatise
Concerning the Modes of Signifying”). For the development of the Western
grammatical tradition, work of this genre was the second great milestone after the
crystallization of Greek thought with the Stoics and Alexandrians. The scholastic
philosophers were occupied with relating words and things—i.e., the structure of
sentences with the nature of the real world—hence their preoccupation with
signification. The aim of the grammarians was to explore how a word (an element of
language) matched things apprehended by the mind and how it signified reality. Since
a word cannot signify the nature of reality directly, it must stand for the thing signified
in one of its modes or properties; it is this discrimination of modes that the study of
categories and parts of speech is all about. Thus the study of sentences should lead
one to the nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.
The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of speech; they
accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through Donatus and Priscian.
The great contribution of these grammarians, who flourished between the mid-13th
and mid-14th century, was their insistence on a grammar to explicate the distinctions
found by their forerunners in the languages known to them. Whether they made the
best choice in selecting logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as
the fields to be included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal
knowledge is less important than the breadth of their conception of the place of
grammar. Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a
separate discipline but had been considered in conjunction with other studies or skills
(such as criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign-language learning). The Greek
view of grammar was rather narrow and fragmented; the Roman view was largely
technical. The speculative medieval grammarians (who dealt with language as
a speculum, “mirror” of reality) inquired into the fundamentals underlying language
and grammar. They wondered whether grammarians or philosophers discovered
grammar, whether grammar was the same for all languages, what the fundamental
topic of grammar was, and what the basic and irreducible grammatical primes are.
Signification was reached by imposition of words on things; i.e., the sign was
arbitrary. Those questions sound remarkably like current issues of linguistics, which
serves to illustrate how slow and repetitious progress in the field is. While
the modistae accepted, by modern standards, a restrictive set of categories,
the acumen and sweep they brought to their task resulted in numerous subtle and fresh
syntactic observations. A thorough study of the medieval period would greatly enrich
the discussion of current questions.

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