Ontologii ale limbajului şi quêtes lingvistice în tratatul dantesc De vulgari eloquentia
Ontologies of Language and Linguistic Quests in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia

Author(s): Andrei-Călin Zamfirescu
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Theoretical Linguistics
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: Dante; medieval language theory; history of linguistics; philosophy of language; theology of language;
Summary/Abstract: Engaged in the process of systematically dissecting the defining evolutionary lines of early modern linguistics, any meticulous historian of the discipline will have repeatedly encountered a contradictory datum. This is the fact that the positivist rudiments that would end up establishing the normative epistemology of linguistics as an empirically grounded scientific domain have emerged as nothing more than a late excrescence, phylogenetically linked, ab origine, to an underlying methodological stratum patroned by the impulses of free generative speculation or those of free ideational association. In exploring the medieval points of germination that established linguistics as its own tentative field, these deontological undercurrents present themselves as the dominant theoretical nodes that have guided the growth of the nascent discipline. The voluminous Etymologiae, authored by Isidore of Seville, remains one of the most noteworthy examples of works that directly epitomize this paradigmatic inclination. Articulated in accordance with its metaphysical assumptions, other, later manuscripts also sought to delve into the hermeneutics of language, ensuring the continued propagation of the frameworks originally constructed and disseminated by Saint Isidore. Dante’s minor works can be appraised as just such a point of reference, the interdisciplinarity of some (proto-)linguistic treatises such as De vulgari eloquentia also standing out as prime examples of the affinities nurtured by medieval thought in relation to the habitus of building synergetic epistemologies. The present study will seek not only to bring back into discussion the theological, mytho-semantic, or ontogenetic valences of this treatise, but also to rehabilitate its speculative methodology, not so much as a coherent (albeit archaic) scientific organon, but as a daring attempt to delineate a metaphysical theory of communication.

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