Thomas of Erfurt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeThomas of ErfurtFirst published Mon May 6, 2002; substantive revision Mon Jul 10, 2006Thomas of Erfurt was the most influential member of a group of latermedieval philosophers known as the speculative grammarians orModistae (Modists), after the central place they assigned tothe modi significandi (modes of signification) of a word intheir analyses of human discourse. The notion that a word, once it hasbeen imposed to signify, carries with it all of its syntactical modes,or possible combinations with other words, had been around since thetwelfth century. What the Modistae did was to posit theorigins of the modi significandi in terms of paralleltheories of modi intelligendi (modes of understanding) andmodi essendi (modes of being). The result was a curiousamalgam of philosophy, grammar, and linguistics. Thomas of Erfurt'sDe modis significandi became the standard Modist textbook inthe fourteenth century, though it has since enjoyed even greater famelater thanks to its misidentification as a work of Duns Scotus. Thetext appeared in early printed editions of Scotus's OperaOmnia, where it was read and commented upon by later figures suchas Charles S. Peirce and Martin Heidegger, whose 1916 doctoral thesis,Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, shouldhave been entitled, Die Kategorienlehre des Duns Scotus und dieBedeutungslehre des Thomas von Erfurt.1. Life2. Writings3. Modism4. InfluenceBibliographyOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. LifeAlmost nothing is known about the life of Thomas of Erfurt exceptthat he was active as a teacher and philosopher in the first quarter ofthe fourteenth century.[1] Presumably, he came from the city of Erfurtin present-day Germany. His work shows the influence of the ParisArts Masters Radulphus Brito (ca. 1270-1320) and Siger of Courtrai (ca.1280-1341), which suggests that he was educated and perhaps also taughtat the University of Paris.[2] Later documents associate him with theschool of St. Severus and the Schottenkloster of St. Jacob at Erfurt.[3] His most famous grammatical text, Demodi significandi (On the Modes of Signifying) was known by 1310and was already being commented upon by 1324. It is possible that hereturned to Paris a number of times over the course of his academiccareer, although there are no records attesting to this.Some copies of De modi significandi attribute the work toan early fourteenth-century English cleric named Thomas of Occam,but scholars have been skeptical about this because it occurs in just ahandful fifteenth-century manuscripts.[4] The vast majority of the manuscript evidence, and all of the earliestwitnesses, refer to its author as Thomas of Erfurt.2. WritingsSix works have been attributed to Thomas of Erfurt. In addition tothe aforementioned grammatical treatise, whose full title isTractatus de modis significandi seu Grammatica speculativa(ed. Bursill-Hall 1972),[5] there are four short expositiones,or literal commentaries: on Porphyry's Isagoge, Aristotle'sCategories, Aristotle's De interpretatione, and theanonymous Liber sex principiorum (Book of Six Principles).Finally, there is a very brief work of mnemonic verses for teachinggrammar to schoolboys, Commentarius in carmen ‘Fundamentumpuerorum’ (ed. Gansiniec 1960), although its editor believesthat it is actually an anonymous abridgement of De modissignificandi. In any case, Thomas's entire reputation derives fromDe modis significandi, which remains his only work tohave been studied in any detail.De modis significandi proved to be so popular that itbecame the standard (and later, the representative) text for the Modisttradition (see next section). It exists in over forty fourteenth-and fifteenth-century manuscripts. A printed edition appeared inthe late fifteenth century that was reprinted an incredible 11times before its ‘definitive’ reprinting in Luke Wadding's1639 edition of the complete works of Duns Scotus.[6]3. ModismThomas of Erfurt belonged to an interesting though somewhat obscuregroup of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century philosophersknown as the speculative grammarians or Modistae. The term‘speculative grammarian’ is ambiguous because it is alsoused by historians of medieval philosophy to refer to twelfth-centuryParisian grammar masters such as William of Conches, Peter Helias, andRalph of Beauvais, who systematically revised the ancient grammars ofDonatus and Priscian — textbooks used to teach Latin to schoolboys — to produce a universal semantics.[7] The two groups are related, as it turns out, since the latter-daygrammarians adopted many of the theories as well as the universalizingtendencies of their twelfth-century predecessors. Foremost among themwas the theory of the modi significandi, or modes ofsignifying. The term ‘Modistae’ or‘Modist’ properly refers to the later group.There was already a grammatical concept of the modisignificandi by the time the first Modistae, Martin ofDacia and Boethius of Dacia, appeared in Paris sometime before 1270.[8] Originally, the idea referred to the different ways in which a wordor expression (dictio) is able to signify something. Wordsthemselves are the product of a primary act of imposition by which aparticular utterance is connected to some thing or property of athing, the utterance providing the matter, which is said to be‘informed’ by the act of imposition. The word acquiresits modi significandi through a second act of impositionencoding all of the general syntactic roles it can play in connectionwith other words and expressions, i.e., the various parts of speech itcan fulfill (e.g., noun, verb, adverb) and the grammatical forms ofthese parts (e.g., the gender, number, and case of nouns; the tenseand mood of verbs). These modes are said to cause the various lexicalforms exhibited by the word in spoken and written languages. Thus,Latin uses the word ‘canis’ to signify what Englishspeakers mean by ‘dog’, but the same modes of signifyingdetermine their function as singular and as nouns.[9] We might think of modi significandi metaphorically as hooksor fasteners on a word because they reflect its potential forcombination with other words in propositions and other grammaticallywell-formed constructions.It is easy to see how such an account of meaning could lead to abona fide theory of grammar, what Jan Pinborg has called“the first systematic syntax developed in western linguistics”.[10] Indeed, speculative grammarians of bothperiods have attracted the attention of linguists and philosophersalike.[11] But the stakes were higher for theModistae because the influx of Aristotle's writings onmetaphysics and natural philosophy in the late twelfth andearly thirteenth centuries forced everyone to think in terms of anew paradigm of knowledge. Could grammar be conceived as the science oflanguage (scientia sermocinalis)? The question here waswhether grammar could count as an Aristotelian speculative science,i.e., whether it is demonstrative in the sense of being aknowledge-producing activity ordained by a single subject whoseprinciples are universal and necessary.[12] Concerns of this sort clearly underlie Boethius of Dacia's appraisalof traditional grammar:subjects in which a demonstrative mode of knowing ispossible are seldom taught in a demonstrative way, but descriptively[sed modo narrativo] … That is why Priscian states manyconclusions for which he offers no reasons, but merely the authority ofancient grammarians. Accordingly, he does not teach, for only those whooffer reasons for what they say are teachers.[13] Thomas of Erfurt indicates in the opening lines of De modissignificativis that he aims to be one of these teachers:The rationale of the method. Since in all science,to understand and to know come about from the knowledge of principles,as is written in I Physics, text comment 1, therefore, wishingto have knowledge of the science of grammar, it is primarily necessaryfor us to dwell upon all of its primary per se principles ofwhich modes are the modes of signifying. But before knowledge is soughtafter in the particulars, there are certain things to be set out inadvance in general, without which it is not possible to have thefullest understanding of them. (DMS, Preamble; Bursill-Hall:1)For Modistae such as Boethius of Dacia and Thomas ofErfurt, the proper subject of grammar is well-formed, significantspeech (sermo congrue significativus), the principles of whichare expressed in the modi significandi.But this is where things get interesting, for the Modistaealso understood the theory of the modi significandi to involveclaims about the nature of thought and reality. The problem withPriscian, as twelfth-century grammarians had pointed out, isthat he said nothing about what causes the different parts of speech.Hence the need for a theory of the modi significandi. But theModistae saw that this could only be part of the answer, forgrammar is a linguistic phenomenon, and linguistic phenomena must havea cause within the natural order of things. Therefore, to complete theexplanation, they argued that the formal structure of the modisignificandi owes its existence to modi intelligendi, ormodes of understanding, which in turn are caused by modiessendi, or the modes of being a thing can exhibit outside themind.The heart of the Modist project is the assumption that there is atriadic or parallel relationship between word, concept, and thing.Meaning is based proximately on understanding but ultimately on being.According to Thomas of Erfurt:Every mode of signifying is from some property of thething. Concerning the second thing to be noted, that since suchnotions or modes of signifying are not fictions, it must be that everymode of signifying radically originates from some property of thething. This is plain thus: since the intellect, in order to signify,imposes the voice under some mode of signifying, it considers theproperty itself of the thing from which it originally drew the mode ofsignifying; this is because the intellect, since it is a passive powerindeterminate of itself, does not advance to a determinate act unlessit is determined from another source. Whence since it imposes the voicein order to signify under the determinate mode of signifying, it isnecessarily moved by a determinate property of the thing; thereforesome property of a thing, or mode of being of a thing, corresponds toany mode of signifying. (DMS, 2.4; Bursill-Hall:3)Note the phrase, “since such notions or modes of signifyingare not fictions.” The modi significandi could not playany causal role in determining the parts of speech, nor thecorresponding modi intelligendi in determining the modisignificandi, nor the modi essendi in determining themodi intelligendi, unless they all actually exist. Here theModistae drew on the Aristotelian idea that although spokensounds and written marks differ from language to language, “whatthese are in the first place signs of - affections of the soul - arethe same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of - actualthings - are also the same” (De interpretatione 1.16a3-9).[14] Likewise, the ordering of modes wasintended to replicate the ordering of disciplines in an Aristotelianspeculative science: just as psychology, the study of moving thingsqua animate, is subordinate to physics, the study of thingsqua moving, and physics is subordinate to metaphysics, thestudy of things qua existing, so the principles of grammar(modi significandi) are derived from mental acts of signifying(modi intelligendi), which reflect the way things really are(modi essendi).Tidy conceptual schemes tend to become less so when confronted withthe facts, and the Modistae spent a great deal of time tryingto explain recalcitrant linguistic data. After sketching the originsof the modi significandi in the first chapters of histreatise, Thomas immediately considers a few objections: how can‘goddess [dea]’ be signified with a femininenoun, which connotes passivity? Answer: a mode of signifying need notalways be drawn from the thing signified, for sometimes it “canbe taken from the property of the thing of another utterance;”thus, when we say ‘in God’, we do not mean to attributepassivity to God, who suffers not, but only to “imagine him asif being affected by our prayers.” When we use a passive orfeminine mode of signifying in relation to God, what we are reallydoing is signifying our own passive or feminine conception of someother thing that is a genuine recipient, i.e.,something that does correspond to a determinate mode of beingqua recipient, and then imposing the same word to signifyGod. In the same way, we impose names on things we cannot sense viathe properties of sensible things, thereby attributing “activemodes of signifying to their names” (DMS 2.5;Bursill-Hall: 4).But what about words signifying fictions, such as‘chimera’, or privations, such as ‘blindness’?These do not correspond to any mode of being, active or passive, sincethey signify nothing (i.e., no thing). According to Thomas, the activemodes of signifying chimeras “are taken from the parts from whichwe imagine a chimera to be composed, which [fiction] we imagine fromthe head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, etc” (DMS2.5; Bursill-Hall: 4). Names of privations, on the other hand,“designate the modes of understanding of privations, which aretheir modes of being, through their own active modes of signifyingabout privations”. The idea here is that ‘blindness’corresponds to our positive concept of sight qua absent, whichenjoys a positive modus essendi in our intellects. Thus,“although privations are not positive beings outside the soul,they are nevertheless positive beings in the soul … and since theunderstanding of them is their being, therefore, their mode ofunderstanding would be their mode of being” (DMS 2.6;Bursill-Hall: 4). Blindness outside the soul cannot cause anyconception of itself per se, since blindness per sedoes not exist, and what does not exist cannot be the cause ofanything. Accordingly, when we say, ‘Homer was a blindman,’ the word ‘blind’ actively signifies the passivemode of understanding something as being without sight, and owes itssemantic function to the way its corresponding concept is understood.In the case of concepts that are neither fictions nor privations, thesemodes of understanding are further determined by their correspondingmodes of being, i.e., by actual substances and properties outside thesoul.For the Modistae, then, the words ‘chimera’ and‘horse’ differ, but only in terms of the complexity oftheir underlying modes. Thomas follows Siger of Courtrai indistinguishing between active and passive modisignificandi/modi intelligendi to explain the differencebetween the act of signifying/understanding (materially construed as aproperty of the utterance/concept) and the object signified/understood(materially construed as a property of the thing signified/understood).The fact that nothing answers to the name ‘chimera’ simplydoes not matter. Modism was a theory about meaning(significatio) of a word as opposed to its reference(suppositio), and reference was regarded as somethingdetermined by the logicians. Besides, if grammatical truths areuniversal and necessary — i.e., if there really is a science ofgrammar — then they cannot be altered by the fact that there are nochimeras. It is the assumption that some palpable phenomenon mustunderlie every grammatical truth, causing it to be the way it is, whichguides Thomas's discussion in the remainder of the treatise, which soonmoves on to more practical matters such as the different parts ofspeech (‘Etymologia’) and their syntax(‘Diasynthetica’). Included in the latter are theconcepts of constructio (the syntactic joining of one word toanother), congruitas (the proper formation of suchconstructions), and perfectio (the proper formation ofcomplete expressions).Modist explanations of semantic phenomena tended to be extremelycomplicated. Indeed, if we consider the manifold ways in which a wordcan be a signifier together with its potential for combination withother words in expressions, there could be infinitely many modisignificandi — a proliferation of modes repeated all over againat the level of modi intelligendi. Philosophers today think ofMeinong's theory of objects as a paradigm case of ontologicalincontinence. These philosophers have never met the Modistae,who would make even Meinong seem parsimonious. But in a way this isunfair, of course, since the Modistae were not ontologists andhad no interest in the metaphysical consequences of their theories.They were first and foremost concerned with the phenomenon oflinguistic meaning, and invoked whatever entities they felt could bestexplain what they observed.Thomas's De modis significandi was the last work to developModist doctrine to any significant degree.[15] Its clarity and relative brevity led to its adoption as the standardModist text in medieval universities, replacing the earlier Modisignificandi of Martin of Dacia. But by 1330 and for reasons thatremain unclear, Modism had completely disappeared from Paris, pushedaside by the more powerful and comprehensive approach of theSummulae de dialectica of John Buridan(ca. 1300-1361).[16] Modism was never able to overcome certain difficulties, such as itsrefusal to recognize extra-linguistic context, as a result of which itcould not explain how meaning can be communicated via incongruous orimperfect expressions.[17] But the most likely reason for its demisewas that it no longer provided satisfying explanations of the phenomenait was supposed to explain. The one thing it could do, provide anaccount for the syntax of Latin grammar, could be achieved moreeconomically by other means. In addition, the theory became absurdlycomplicated in order to save the phenomena of the modisignificandi, suggesting that the modi finally collapsedunder their own weight, like so many Ptolemaic epicycles.4. InfluenceThomas of Erfurt's De modis significandi has enjoyed moreattention than it might otherwise have received thanks to its earlymisidentification as a work of Duns Scotus.[18] As a result, it was printed along with authentic works on logic involume 1 of Luke Wadding's seventeenth-century edition of theOpera Omnia of Duns Scotus (Lyons 1639), and again in thenineteenth-century reprint of Wadding by Juan-Luis Vivès (Paris 1891).[19] Until very recently, the Wadding-Vivès edition was thedefinitive source for the works of Duns Scotus, so anyone consultingit would have associated De modis significandi with him.[20]Complicating the story somewhat is the fact that Duns Scotus wasinfluenced by Modism early in his career, though this was probably dueto his exposure to Modist authors such as Simon of Faversham and Andrewof Cornwall.[21] It is unlikely that he was influenced byThomas of Erfurt, because De modis significandi did notcirculate widely until after Scotus's death.One of the many later figures to have unwittingly admired Thomas wasthe American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), whoregarded Duns Scotus as a fellow traveler in metaphysics and whose ownsemiotic theory resembles the Modist program in certain respects.[22] Peirce quotes verbatim the firstsix chapters of De modis significandis in an 1869 lecturecomparing the views of (what he took to be) Duns Scotus and William ofOckham on names and signification. But the lecture is introductory incharacter, leaving it uncertain whether Peirce fully appreciated whatwas at stake in Modistic grammar, rather than viewing it, say, as somesort of linguistic addendum to Scotus's metaphysics.[23]Another figure so influenced was Martin Heidegger, whoseHabilitationsschrift was published in 1916 under the title,Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. Thisbook has not been much studied by Heidegger scholars, which is a pitybecause it is really about Heidegger's own project of advancing theHusserlian notion of a priori grammar. A work of historicalscholarship it is not. In what now seems a classic understatement, thehistorian of medieval philosophy Martin Grabmann wrote of this book in1926, “Martin Heidegger has demonstrated the continuity of theGrammatica speculativa hitherto attributed to Duns Scotuswith the terminology and overall intellectual outlook of Husserl, sothat the structure and distinctiveness of the medieval original issomewhat obscured”.[24] In his defense, Heidegger never pretendsto be doing history of philosophy in Die Kategorien- undBedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. On the contrary, he states at thebeginning of Part II that he is mostly interested in exploring theimplications of De modis significandi for the broader theoryof meaning, and that he is following scholarly consensus in attributingit to Duns Scotus.[25]In 1922, however, Grabmann conclusively demonstrated that it wasThomas of Erfurt who wrote De modis significandi, not Duns Scotus.[26] So the claim that Heidegger wrote his Habilitationsschrifton Duns Scotus is only partly true. The first half, dieKategorienlehre, is correctly addressed to Duns Scotus's theoryof the categories as developed in his authentic commentaries onPorphyry's Isagoge, and Aristotle's Categories andDe sophisticis elenchis. But the second half, dieBedeutungslehre, is based almost entirely on Thomas of Erfurt.[27]For more recent influence, we need look no further than JacquesDerrida, who mentions Thomas (this time dressed as himself) inconnection with the old Peircean idea that logic is a branch ofsemiotics: “As in Husserl (but the analogy, although it is mostthought-provoking, would stop there and one must apply it carefully),the lowest level, the foundation of the possibility of logic (orsemiotics) corresponds to the project of the Grammaticaspeculativa of Thomas d'Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus”.[28] What impresses Derrida is not so much the reduction of logic togrammar as the deconstructive potential of Husserl's phenomenology ofsigns. The idea of deconstructing the science of language would havestruck Thomas as absurd, of course, though he probably would have feltsome affinity with the highly variegated notion of the sign in modernsemiotics. BibliographyPrimary SourcesBursill-Hall, G. L. (ed. and tr.): 1972, Thomas of Erfurt:Grammatica Speculativa, The Classics of Linguistics, 1, London,Longmans. [DMS]Gansiniec, R. (ed.): 1960, [Thomas of Erfurt,]“Fundamentum Puerorum,” in Metrificale marka zopatowca i traktaty gramatyczne XIV i XV wieku [= TheChronicles of Mark of Opatowec and Grammatical Treatises of theXIVth and XVth Centuries], Studiastaropolskie, VI, Wroclaw, 105-6.Garcia, M. Fernandez (ed.): 1902, B. Ioannis Duns Scoti Doct.Subtilis O.F.M. Grammaticae speculativae nova editio, Ad ClarasAquas, Quaracchi.Grotz, Stephan (tr.): 1998, Thomas von Erfurt, Abhandlungüber die bedeutsamen Verhaltensweisen der Sprache. TractatusDe modis significandi, John Benjamins, Amsterdam-Philadelphia. [Germantranslation of De Modis Significandis]Wadding, Luke (ed.): 1639, Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia,vol. 1, Durand, Lyons, 45-76.Secondary SourcesAshworth, E. J.: 1977, The Tradition of Medieval Logic andSpeculative Grammar, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,Toronto.Biard, Joël: 1989, Logique et théorie du signe auXIVe siècle, Vrin, Paris.Bursill-Hall, G. L.: 1971, Speculative Grammars of the MiddleAges: The Doctrine of the partes orationis of theModistae, Approaches to Semantics, 11, Mouton, The Hague.Derrida, Jacques: 1976, Of Grammatology, tr. GayatriChakravorty Spivak, The Johns Hopkins University Press,Baltimore-London.Ebbesen, Sten: 1998, “The Paris Arts Faculty: Siger ofBrabant, Boethius of Dacia, Radulphus Brito,” in MedievalPhilosophy, ed. John Marenbon, The Routledge History ofPhilosophy, III, Routledge, London-New York, 269-90.Fredborg, Karin Margareta: 1980, “Universal Grammar Accordingto Some 12th-Century Grammarians,” in Studies in MedievalLinguistic Thought, ed. Konrad Koerner et al., HistoriagraphiaLinguistica, VII.1/2, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 69-84.Fredborg, Karin Margareta: 1988, “Speculative Grammar,”in A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York, 177-95.Grabmann, Martin: 1922, “De Thoma Erfordiensi auctoreGrammaticae quae Ioanni Duns Scoto adscribitur speculativae,”Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 15, 273-7.Grabmann, Martin: 1926, Mittelalterliches Geistesleben.Abhandlung zur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystic, Bd. 1, MaxHeuber, München, 116-25.Grabmann, Martin: 1943, Thomas von Erfurt und die Sprachlogikdes mittelalterlichen Aristotelismus, Sitzungsberichte derBayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, Heft 2, Heuber,München.Heidegger, Martin: 1916, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehredes Duns Scotus, J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen. Rpr. in MartinHeidegger: 1972, Frühe Schriften, Vittorio Klostermann,Frankfurt am Main, 130-375.Heidegger, Martin: 1970, Traité des categories et de lasignification chez Duns Scot, tr. Florent Gaboriau,Éditions Gallimard, Paris.Kaczmarek, Ludger (ed.): 1994, Destructiones modorumsignificandi, B. R. Grüner, Amsterdam-Philadelphia.Kelly, L. G.: 1971, “De modis generandi: Points ofContact between Noam Chomsky and Thomas of Erfurt,” FoliaLinguistica 5, 225-52.Kneepkens, C. H.: 1995, “The Priscianic Tradition,” inSprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, ed. StenEbbesen, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 239-64.Lorenz, Sönke: 1989, Studium Generale Erfordense. ZumErfurter Schulleben im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, Monographien zurGeschichte des Mittelalters, 34, Stuttgart, 312-25.Marmo, Costantino: 1994, Semiotica e linguaggio nellascolastica: Parigi, Bologna, Erfurt, 1270-1330. La semioticadei Modisti, Instituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo,Roma.Marmo, Costantino: 1995, “A Pragmatic Approach to Language inModism,” in Sprachtheorien in Spätantike undMittelalter, ed. Sten Ebbesen, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen,169-83.Marmo, Costantino: 1999, “The Semantics of theModistae,” in Medieval Analyses in Language andCognition, Acts of the Symposium, ‘The Copenhagen School ofMedieval Philosophy’, January 10-13, 1996, ed. Sten Ebbesen andRussell L. Friedman, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters - C.A. Reitzels Forlag, Copenhagen, 83-104.McGrath, Sean J., 2003, “Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truthand Language,” Review of Metaphysics 57.2: 323-43.Nickl, Milutin Michael: 2004, Zur Aktualität des Thomasvon Erfurt und Jan de Stobnica, Minores Europaeorum 1,Europaforum, Erlangen.Peirce, Charles S.: 1984, “Ockam. Lecture 3 [1869]” inWritings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume2: 1867-1871, ed. Edward C. Moore et al., Indiana University Press,Bloomington, 317-36.Pinborg, Jan: 1967, Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie imMittelalter, BGPM, XLII.2, Aschendorff, Münster.Pinborg, Jan, Heinrich Roos and P. J. Jensen (eds.): 1969,Boethii Dacii Modi Significandi sive Quaestiones super PriscianumMaiorem, Corpus Philosophorum Danicorum Medii Aevi, 4, G. E. C.Gad, Copenhagen.Pinborg, Jan: 1974, Review of Bursill-Hall 1972 in Lingua34 (1974): 369-73.Pinborg, Jan: 1982, “Speculative Grammar,” in TheCambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. NormanKretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge-New York, 254-69.Pironet, Fabienne: 1997, The Tradition of Medieval Logic andSpeculative Grammar: A Bibliography (1977-1994), Brepols,Turnhout.Trentman, John: 1975, “Speculative Grammar andTransformational Grammar: A Comparison of PhilosophicalPresuppositions,” in Hermann Parret (ed.), History ofLinguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, Walter DeGruyter, Berlin.Robins, R. H.: 1997, A Short History of Linguistics,4th edition, Longman, London-New York, 79-109.Rosier, Irène: 1983, La grammaire spéculative desModistes, PUF, Paris.Rosier, Irène: 1995, “Res significata et modussignificandi: Les implications d'une distinctionmédiévale,” in Sprachtheorien inSpätantike und Mittelalter, ed. Sten Ebbesen, Gunter NarrVerlag, Tübingen, 135-68.Other Internet Resources[Please contact the author with suggestions.] Related Entries Duns Scotus, John | Heidegger, Martin | Peirce, Charles Sanders | semiotics: medieval | Simon of Faversham Copyright © 2006 byJack Zupko<jzupko@emory.edu> |
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