The Schoolmen. The first five or six centuries of the
Middle Ages in Europe were an era of intellectual
recession in all branches of learning. Latin continued
to be studied, as it was the language of the Church,
and the normal means of communication of all clerics.
But knowledge of Greek almost disappeared in the
Western part of the former Empire. The classical Latin
authors were also largely neglected. Therefore, one of
the chief incentives for grammatical study, namely, the
interpretation of an old and difficult literature, was
lacking. Under the circumstances the chief function of
grammar became the pedagogical one. The youngsters
were to be taught to read and to write correctly.
Donatus' Ars grammatica was widely used as an ele-
mentary textbook. In fact, the name of the grammarian
eventually came to be used as an ordinary noun, donet,
meaning “primer,” in medieval England.
Everything that was written on grammatical subjects
in the Middle Ages took the form of commentaries on
Donatus or, even more, Priscianus. Some small ad-
vances were made in these commentaries. Thus the
important distinction between noun and adjective
(Nomen substantivum and Nomen adjectivum) was first
made, it seems, in the tenth or eleventh century. Some
advances were also made in syntax. Thus the subject-
predicate dichotomy was definitely reintroduced into
grammar under the names of suppositum and
appositum, and the clause-like construction called
ablativus absolutus was recognized and defined.
But the independent effort of the Middle Ages in
the study of language was the doctrine of the modi
significandi. That doctrine was developed in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and arose from a
desire to raise the status of grammatical teaching by
making it conform to the standards set by Aristotelian
logic and metaphysics. Aristotelian philosophy had by
this time completely taken hold of the Arts faculties
in the schools, especially in the famous university in
Paris. In order to qualify as a science, grammar should
be deducible from first principles by the methods de-
veloped in the current scholastic philosophy. And the
first principles of grammar, one held, were the modi
significandi, “ways of signifying.” These were con-
sidered to be similar in all languages. Thus the
Modistae, as they were called, thought they were
building up a truly general grammar. They also called
their science grammatica generalis or speculativa. Ba-
sically, the modi significandi are an attempt to define
the functions of the different parts of speech. For
instance, words like dolere, “suffer,” and dolor, “pain,”
were said to have the same significatio, namely, pain,
but different modi significandi: one signifying per
modum fieri, the other per modum substantiae. The
parts of speech definitions of Priscianus were restated
in terms of the new concept. Later the concept was
also used to redefine the subclasses and the inflected
forms. The modes were then used as a basis for ex-
plaining syntax. Such a system, of course, was bound
to fail in the same way as Priscianus' syntax failed.
An adequate syntax requires an adequate theory of
sentence structure, whereas Priscianus and the
Modistae had only a (deficient) theory of word classes.
In reality the Modistae did no more than translate
Priscianus' rather haphazard and ad hoc grammatical
concepts into a highly abstract and abstruse termi-
nology. It had only one advantage: it could be easily
tied up with the common metaphysical jargon of the
time. But when metaphysical realism gave way to
metaphysical nominalism in the fourteenth century, the
Modistae became obsolete. By and large the gram-
marians returned to the more practical but somewhat
humdrum explanations of Donatus and Priscianus.
At the same time the claim of the Modistae that
grammar should be considered as a general science had
to be abandoned. It was to be taken up again some
centuries later by the Port-Royal grammarians in a far
more adequate form, freed from the hampering medie-
val veneration for authorities and from the sterile
verbalism of the Schoolmen, and based on a far broader
foundation of factual knowledge of languages.
