What Language Does

Alessandro Vatri

The Aristotelian Corpus is an invaluable source for the history of Greek linguistics. The Rhetoric and the Poetics, along with the Organon, offer the largest body of observations on language, its workings, and its effect from the classical period, and are a prime — and often unique — testimony of contemporary and earlier intellectual linguistic discourse. At the same time, the works of Aristotle are an underexplored source for the history of the Greek language, both as linguistic material and as first-hand evidence of the native perception and cognition of the language itself.

The study of Aristotle’s use of language has long been hampered by the prejudice that he was not an artful writer. The style of his prose has largely been regarded as careless and unpolished, and the literary value his production has been dismissed as a that of a collection of esoteric lecture notes that were never intended for circulation extra moenia. Whether or not this is true or fair, the Aristotelian writings are a body of language that was produced for specific communicative purposes and under specific socio-cultural and ethnographic circumstances, and as such are endowed with their own ‘rhetoric’ and pragmatics. For one thing, this makes their style worth studying regardless of any judgment of artistic value. For another, the study of the strategies and techniques deployed by Aristotle is a crucial step in identifying the place of his works in the history of ancient Greek technical writing as a communicative, if not literary, genre — an approach that has so far been explored especially for disciplines such as medicine, astronomy, or mathematics.

The study of the communicative dynamics enacted and encoded by ancient Greek texts has gained extraordinary momentum in the last few decades. The analytical and descriptive tools of modern linguistics have been profitably applied to the reconstruction of the pragmatics, semantics, perception and comprehension of Classical Greek and have helped to reveal in which ways communicative situations, the author’s purposes and priorities, and the audience’s expectations and assumed competences are able to shape the linguistic forms of ancient texts.

This part of our project exploits the toolbox of cognitive, functional, and corpus linguistics to interpret the style of Aristotle from this perspective. The linguistic features that may be identified in Aristotle’s works are interpreted according to their possible communicative functions in the speech community Aristotle was a member of, and their combination and cooccurrence is taken to reveal the communicative ‘character’ of the text or passage where they can be detected. This approach — which includes both the fine-grained analysis of passages and the use of quantitative and statistical techniques on large amounts of text — enables comparing texts with each other and with works of other authors and genres and makes it possible to build a solid foundation for the synchronic and diachronic contextualization of the Aristotelian corpus. In addition, it also provides a key for the reassessment of the long-standing conundrum concerning the relationship between the Aristotelian corpus and oral delivery.

The study of Aristotle’s use of language is also largely informed by the linguistic observations offered by Aristotle himself. His works offer a wealth of evidence for the aesthetic and cognitive effects Classical Greek structures had on native speakers — we are told what linguistic features make texts clear or obscure, vivid or dull, good or bad sounding, etc. Interpreting and abstracting from these materials may help us shed light on aspects of the syntax, semantics, prosody, and psychoacoustics of Classical Greek which are by and large out of reach for modern readers in the absence of native speakers. This is a complex task, and it is no surprise that specialists in Greek linguistics hardly ever put Aristotle’s observation to use for this purpose. In general, ancient observations on language and its use may be informed by philosophical concerns, by current themes and ideas in ancient intellectual/literary discourse, and by the very tradition of disciplines — such as rhetoric — whose documentation has suffered many regrettable losses. In particular, Aristotle’s remarks need to be interpreted against the background of Aristotle’s philosophy, his contemporary cultural environment, and the rhetorical tradition, and alongside other Aristotelian works, the doctrines and observations of Antisthenes, Alcidamas, Isocrates, and Plato, the Rhetoric to Alexander, and Aristoxenus, whose musical writings reveal terminological and conceptual overlaps with Aristotle’s observations on the acoustic perception of speech. The multidisciplinary and collaborative work performed in this project makes it possible to navigate these materials while carefully discerning and disentangling the intellectual and cultural factors at play, providing the ideal platform for the systematic querying of Aristotle as a primary ‘informant’.

The results of this part of the project will be collected in a monograph exploring Aristotle and language use both from the perspective of his observations and of his practice, with the common denominator of a pragmatic and cognitive perspective. The starting point for this investigation will be the interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion of lexis in the Rhetoric — a treatise I have written on repeatedly in my research activity so far^[1] — while the other part of the monograph will deal with Aristotle’s communicative registers as they emerge from our reading of the corpus.