ELEMENTS OF THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS IN PRISCIAN'S 'INSTITUTIONES' (LATIN; CONSTANTINOPLE)

Twentieth-century linguistics, judging from a strictly modern point of view, dismisses Priscian's work as unscientific, lacking in method, and irrelevant to the progress of modern linguistics. Yet Priscian's place at the end of the long tradition of classical grammar, building on the work of his many predecessors and functioning as a principal source of information for medieval grammarians, points up his importance for the western grammatical tradition. An examination of Priscian's Institutiones shows that this work made available to Priscian's successors certain fundamental theories on the nature of language as well as doctrines about specific grammatical points.;The presentation of the different levels of language and definitions of the noun and verb represent the most extensive theoretical discussions in Priscian's work. These discussions stress the role of the communication situation in governing language production, analogies between language and the physical universe, and the definitive importance of the semantic component of language. These discussions also suggest the importance of the derivation process.;Discussions of specific subcategories of the parts of speech, such as the paradigm for the reflexive pronoun sui, the formation of interrogatives, and the treatment of other types of "understood" elements in language, help to define the semantic component as a set of what may be called meaning totalities. These meaning totalities must be broken down into their component parts and then matched with linguistic forms in order to generate language. Meaning totalities are partially influenced by the extralinguistic universe and by the communication situation.;Priscian's analyses of the process of derivation are an effort to account partially for the origin of language, or at least of particular language forms, through a theory of derivation in which all paradigms are divided into primary or original forms and secondary or derived forms. Priscian establishes criteria for this division and also suggests other relationships among paradigms.;Priscian views language as a phenomenon produced in the physical universe and in a communication situation, in which meaning totalities are matched with corresponding language forms, most of which, in turn, are generated by a smaller class of primary forms. The theory of derivation and the notion of the relationship between the physical universe, the speakers' perceptions of it, and the structure of language provided important material for medieval grammarians.