3. Linguistics in the Renaissance period. Emergence of General rational grammar

latini sermonis, posthumously published in London in 1524, a large
work, mainly on syntax, based on the ancient grammarians and the
Italian Humanists.23 William Lily, who had been Sulpicio Verulano’ s
pupil in Rome, composed a brief work on syntax at Colet’ s request,
the Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus (ed.
15 x3)^ which was corrected by Erasmus and popularly attributed to
him, and which was very widespread throughout Europe. A combination
o f a syntax by Lily in Latin and a morphology by Colet in English,
which started to spread in the late 1520s, in 1540 became the official
Latin grammar o f the Kingdom o f England, and remained so for more
than two centuries. The royal injunction that made it compulsory praised
the advantages o f a single grammar, and underlined the appropriateness
o f keeping to excellence, once it had been attained. This has been seen
as a sign o f the closing o f a historical period, the time o f the reform o f
Latin grammar on the basis o f usage and the ancients’ precepts.24
In 1540, the same year in which L ily ’s grammar is made official in
this way, Julius Caesar Scaliger, a doctor o f Italian descent, published
a rational and explicative grammar in Lyons - or rather a work of
philosophical reflection on grammar, and often against grammarians -
that shows from the title itself (De causis linguae latinae) how completely
it fits within an Aristotelian context, that returns to traits that
are typical o f Modist grammar, and that opens up an alternative line to
the Humanist one we have been examining up to this point.23 One of
the traits which is openly inherited from the recent tradition (other
debts towards it are often concealed by Scaliger) is the statement that
grammar is founded on usage, derived from Quintilian’ s ideas. But, with
an undeniably modem move, Scaliger means spoken usage, since writing
was a secondary accident of language (an idea that was not part
of the Humanists’ culture); grammatical science (not art) must provide
the rational explanation (not merely a description) o f this usage, aiming
towards recte loqui (speaking correctly) - giving increased value once
more to the aspect which the Humanists had devalued in favour o f latine
loqui. One finds here, therefore, a criticism o f Valla ’s elegantia and o f
all the others who had confused grammar with rhetoric, a criticism that
in actual fact omits the explanatory aspects which are present in V alla ’ s
acute analyses o f the differences in usage. The idea of the arbitrariness
o f the sign, pointed out as fundamental in the De causis as well as in
the general grammar to which this opens the way,26 is the Aristotelian
idea which, in order to avoid ambiguity, we should call conventionality
of the sign: i.e. the concepts are the same for all mankind, and the
only arbitrary or conventional thing is the relation between this predetermined
semantic universe and the semi-random set o f signifiers which
designates it in the various historical and natural languages. In this
there is undoubtedly a loss o f insight compared with the Humanist (and
in particular Valla’ s) reflection on the different expression o f experience
conditioned by the different structures o f two languages such as
Latin and Greek. This reflection had developed from the work o f collating
and translating texts in the two languages; but any activity in
interpreting texts, which traditionally was within the grammarian’s province,
is excluded from the field o f grammar by Scaliger. The causae
mentioned in the title recall the four Aristotelian causes underlying all
things. Phonetic substance must be considered the causa materialis, in
the formation o f words, and the meaning that is linked with it must be
considered the causa formalis (in accordance with the medieval doctrine
which applied the terms materialiter mdformaliter to the signifier
and the signified respectively); the action of whoever imposes the names
is considered the causa efficiens and the purpose o f this imposition is
considered the causa finalis. Similar quadripartite explanations are given
for other linguistic data.27 We are within a fundamentally synchronic
‘causality’ . Scaliger in particular, recovering from the Modistae the
distinction between significare and consigniflcare (respectively the lexical
meaning and the grammatical meaning), attributes to each part of speech
its own way of formulating aspects o f reality (the noun is nota rei permanentis,
the verb nota rei sub tempore, etc.). It seems that one can say
that this reproduces a concept o f language as the reflection o f a mental
structure, which in turn is the reflection of a structure o f reality.28 The
prevalence (of Aristotelian tradition) o f the semantic aspect (indicated
by the adjective formalis) over what we call the formal criterion has also
been noticed: hence, for example, one has three identical adjectives
fe lix , one masculine, one feminine, one neuter, and a quantity o f categories
and subcategories o f the noun on a purely notional basis.
On the other hand, the unexpected formal approach has been emphasized
which characterizes Pierre de la Ramee’ s (Petrus Ramus’ ) grammatical
work: the Scholae in liherales artes (a work on theory), the
Grammatica and the Rudimenta grammaticae latinae, all published in
1559.29 The influence o f Ramus on the history o f culture and education
is linked mainly with his attempts to redefine logic and rhetoric, which
aim to make a clear distinction between the two disciplines and redefine
logic in radically anti-Aristotelian terms (at least in the declaration o f
intent). The kind o f logic to which he dedicated most o f his work
(which partially displaced rhetoric in the school curricula influenced by
his reform), is a more empirical and simpler logic, linked to the practical
needs o f preachers, lawyers and orators in general, and destined
to become very widespread in seventeenth-century Protestant Europe.
Where grammar is concerned, he agrees that it should be excluded from
the traditional component o f interpretation o f literary texts. The basis o f
this discipline is usage, as in Quintilian, but it is mainly spoken usage
(even if in practice literary models play a greater role than that allowed
in theory). Moreover, the purpose of grammar is seen, with an emphasis
that is lacking in Quintilian, in identifying a ratio which is inductively
obtained by observing usage. In grammar, too, the proclaimed anti-
Aristotelianism does not prevent the adoption o f Aristotelian elements,
starting from the fundamental division of parts o f speech into noun,
verb and sync ategoremata. However, it is precisely the characterization
o f these elements that presents important examples o f distancing from the
semantic criteria used by Aristotle in favour o f formal criteria. So the
dichotomy between noun and verb on the one hand, and syncategoremata
on the other, is expressed as the dichotomy between voces numeri and