“accipiendo vel compilando ab aliis”: De vulgari eloquentia 1.1. Reading Dante with Dante: A contribution to Dante’s theory of language

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110225
Author(s):  
Maria Luisa Ardizzone

This article analyzes Dante’s theory of language and considers at first a few fragments of Dante’s Latin treatise on the vernacular, reading them in light of their ancient-medieval contexts. This reading allows part-modification of the critical discourse about Dante’s theory of language. The article argues that Dante’s discussion did not start in the De vulgari eloquentia, as is commonly assumed, but was at first introduced in the Vita nuova. Recent studies show that the theme of laude in the Vita nuova includes a linguistic theory and a discourse on the deep structures of language. Focussing on specific words, considering them in light of the ancient-medieval background, the article organizes a transverse reading that considers layers of Dante’s discourse on language from the Vita nuova to the Commedia not yet explored and evaluated.

Author(s):  
Frederick J. Newmeyer

AbstractThis article examines a key feature of Denis Bouchard's Sign Theory of Language, namely theSubstantive Hypothesis(SH), the idea that “the most explanatory linguistic theory is one that minimizes the elements (ideally to zero) that do not have an external motivation in the prior properties of the perceptual and conceptual substances of language”. The article argues that the strongest form of the SH is challenged by two widespread classes of phenomena: morphosyntactic generalizations that are not sign-based, and non-sign-based external pressures on grammars. It concludes with some speculative remarks on why, to a significant degree, grammatical patterning is not sign-based.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek R. Ford

While the general intellect continues to provide a rich resource for understanding post-Fordism and for theorizing resistance, there remains a neglected aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the role that art can play in resistance based on it. This article develops the general intellect along these lines by drawing on two theorists who are rarely thought together: Paolo Virno and Jean-François Lyotard. The article begins by introducing the general intellect and Virno’s reconceptualization of it as the general or generic intellect. It then introduces a relationship between art and the general intellect by reading Virno’s theory of language, speech, and communication. From here, it goes to his theory of exodus, which is then read back through his linguistic theory to draw out the key role that subjective defection plays in the project. Although Virno doesn’t spend much time discussing art, his brief remarks are used as an entry point to move to Lyotard’s writings on music and art, where the author fleshes out an aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the project of exodus. The argument focuses on the artistic gesture (the “art” in/of the artwork) and especially timbre as witnesses and eruptions of the potentiality of the general intellect that can never be properly actualized. By analyzing timbre as a fugitive force that desubjectifies those gathered around music, the author argues that it provides an example of the opening necessary for the subjective defection that inaugurates exodus. In this way, the aesthetic dimension added to the general intellect is the generic capacity to be affected and disindividuated.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nergis Ertürk

A comparative study of the politics and theory of language in the writings of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpιnar and Walter Benjamin, this article suggests that a rethinking of the discursive commensurability and incommensurability of modern Turkish language and literature with western European representational practices has crucial implications for critical comparative methodology today. I leave behind conventional accounts based on models of European literary influence, emphasizing instead changes in writing practices that accompanied the development of modern literature and comparatism. Of particular significance for my analysis are the intensification of print culture and language reforms. I examine Tanpιnar's writings as a special archive registering the problematic of representational writing, while exploring their continuities and discontinuities with Benjamin's work. I configure an alternative critical comparative framework, troubling the uneven epistemological categories of modernity through which “East” and “West” continue to structure even the transnationalist critical discourse that interrogates them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-313
Author(s):  
Keith Allan

AbstractThis essay begins by identifying what communication is and what linguistics is in order to establish the relationship between them. The characterization of linguistics leads to discussion of the nature of language and of the relationship between a theory of language, i. e., linguistic theory, and the object language it models. This, in turn, leads to a review of speculations on the origins of human language with a view to identifying the motivation for its creation and its primary function. After considering a host of data, it becomes clear that, contrary to some approaches, the primary function of human language is to function as a vehicle of communication. Thus, linguistics studies what for humans is their primary vehicle of communication.


1970 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 617
Author(s):  
Charles N. Staubach ◽  
Richard Barrutia

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Frederick J. Newmeyer

Introspective judgments of acceptability have long been criticized for being both inconsistent and irrelevant. A number of publications have addressed the former issue and have argued that such judgments, carefully collected, are generally consistent. It remains the case, however, that many linguists question whether introspective data are or can be relevant to the construction of the correct theory of language. In the view of many usage-based grammarians, the sentences made up by analysts rather than real-life utterances lead inevitably to the supposedly unrealistic and complex abstract structures posited by generative grammarians. The chapter challenges that view. Appealing to a 170 MB corpus of conversational English, it argues that introspective data and conversational data do not lead to different conclusions about the nature of linguistic theory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-58
Author(s):  
Nelson Semol Kalay

There are many impacts of the conflict Ambon that occurred years ago which are still found in society. Two of them are collective trauma memory and settlement religious-based segregation. The focus of this article is the communal discourse on the settlement pattern of religious-based segregation. The theory as the basic perspective of this study is a socio-linguistic theory developed by Norman Fairclough through Critical Discourse Analysis Approach. The principle notion of this approach is that discourse has an important role in shaping a society. Therefore, the aim of this article is to remind all that because of the complexity faced by the society after the conflict, trust-building, and trauma-healing are programs that all must work on, especially when one talks about religion and nationalism in the Moluccas context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 359-365

The Communitive Approach in language teaching starts from а theory of language as communication. The goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence. Another linguistic theory of communication favored in CLT is functional account of language use. Linguistic is concerned with the description of speech acts of texts, since only through study of language in use are all the functions of language and therefore all components of meaning brought into focus. The goal of language teaching is to develop what referred to as “communicative competence”. This term is coined in order to contrast а communicative view of language and theory of competence. Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in а completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distribution, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.


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