Whereas the initial goal of Chomsky's TG was merely to specify the set of grammatical sentences, the Modistae always took it for granted that syntax and semantics were closely linked. They called grammatical features modi significandi because they saw each feature as an aspect of the way meaning is encoded. They did, of course, acknowledge that some features, such as grammatical gender, are "accidental" in that they belong to the arbitrary structure of Latin rather than the essence of human language.
Like much of traditional grammar, modistic grammar is implicitly generative; that is, it describes whole sentences by describing how the parts are put together. However, modistic syntax is not transformational; each sentence has only one structure.
Instead of phrase-structure rules, modistic grammar uses a dependency framework; each word-to-word link is called a constructio and there are two criteria of headship. The syntactic head, called primum or prius, is the governor or the modified element, the one presupposed by the other. The semantic head, or terminans, supplies or points the way to the referent. Syntactic headship was introduced into modern transformational grammar by Chomsky (1970) and Jackendoff (1977), and, subject to certain conditions, dependency trees are equivalent to X-bar trees (Covington 1992). Semantic headship is, as far as I know, not used in modern work, although the theory of discourse referents bears some relation to it.
Even worse, when you conjoin two singular NPs you get a plural NP even though none of the words within it is plural. The fundamental assumption of dependency grammar and X-bar theory, that the features of every phrase are those of its head word, breaks down.
In Quaestio I.24 the question is whether all constructions are either transitive or intransitive, i.e., whether in every construction the syntactic and semantic heads are either the same or different. The alternative would be to have constructions in which one type of head is missing or undefined. The issue is therefore whether all constructions are endocentric.
Radulphus argues that the grammatical relations in Socrates et Plato currunt are doubled up. Both Socrates and Plato are subjects of the verb, which assigns nominative case to both of them. (Thus also Tesnière 1959, who calls this phenomenon dédoublement.) In modistic grammar, the sentence is the maximal projection of N, not V, so the result is a two-headed structure with one verb depending on both nouns.
The relation between et and the conjuncts is less obvious, but again Radulphus resorts to doubling up. He argues that et is a modifier of both of the conjuncts and therefore depends on both of them. It follows that (in modern terms) Socrates et Plato is not a constituent; instead, Socrates et and et Plato are two noun phrases that share the word et (Fig. 1). This gives an ill-formed dependency tree, but no more ill-formed than it was already; once you've admitted dédoublement, you should use it everywhere it's applicable. Radulphus' sense of theoretical economy is reminiscent of modern generative grammar.
Fig. 1. Dependency structure and equivalent X-bar tree for Radulphus' analysis.
In Quaestio I.69, Radulphus tackles the plural verb agreeing with two conjoined singulars. He notes that two singulars do not always make a plural: "Socrates or Plato" takes a singular verb, and "runs and disputes" takes a singular subject. Clearly, we're looking at a rule that applies only to NPs joined by "and." This alone is enough to put it outside the regular system for building syntactic structure.
Next Radulphus argues that there is no real semantic plurality in Socrates et Plato. Plurals, in his system of semantics, signify per modum unius plurificati ("in terms of one thing multiplied") but Socrates et Plato signifies two things as singulars. On this semantic ground, Radulphus rejects as misguided any attempt to treat Socrates et Plato as a plural phrase. He already had no place to put the plural feature, since et is not the head word, Socrates and Plato are not plural, and in fact Socrates et Plato, on his analysis, is not a constituent (has no single head). Nor can the verb respond directly to the presence of "and" since it has no syntactic link to it.
What's left? Only the radical alternative that, strictly speaking, the verb should be singular, and something outside the basic grammar pluralizes it. This is what Radulphus concludes: "Socrates and Plato run," with a plural verb, is a figure of speech, but the figure is obligatory. That is, the grammar specifies a singular verb, but, obligatorily, speakers of Latin must change the verb to plural in this situation. He cites Priscian (c. 500) and Petrus Helias (c. 1140) in support of this analysis, comparing it to conceptio personarum ("combining of persons," as in "You (2nd pers.) and I (1st pers.) run (1st pers.)," which he also considers to be a figure of speech.
What is crucial here is the idea that figurative construction, i.e., deviation from the basic grammar, is obligatory. The grammar generates the sentence in one form and then its form gets changed by the obligatory figure. This is the only transformational syntactic analysis I have encountered in modistic grammar, although the seeds of the idea were present in the ancient concept of figures of speech, and may have germinated at more than one time and place. Centuries later, a different classical figure, ellipsis, formed the basis for the account of conjunction in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures.
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian linguistics. New York: Harper and Row.
Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. Readings in English transformational grammar, ed. R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum, pp. 184-221. Waltham, Mass.: Ginn.
Covington, Michael A. 1984. Syntactic theory in the High Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Covington, Michael A. 1992. GB theory as dependency grammar. Proceedings, International Congress of Linguists.
Jackendoff, Ray S. 1977. X' syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Radulphus Brito (Raoul le Breton). c. 1300. Quaestiones super Priscianum minorem, ed. Heinz W. Enders and Jan Pinborg. 2 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980.
Robins, R. H. 1967. A short history of linguistics. London: Longman.
Rosier, Irène. 1983. La grammaire spéculative des modistes. Lille: Presses Universitaires.
Pinborg, Jan. 1967. Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter. (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, 42.2.) Münster: Aschendorff; Copenhagen: Arne Frost-Hansen.
Tesnière, Lucien. 1959. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.
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