Overview

In The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification, Ana María Mora-Márquez presents an exhaustive study of the three 13th-century discussions explicitly dealing with the notion of Significatio. Her study aims to show that the three discussions emerge because of apparently opposite claims about the signification of words in the authoritative literature of the period, namely in Aristotle, Boethius and Priscian. It also shows that the three discussions develop in the same direction – towards a unified use of the notion of signification, which keeps its explanatory role in semiotics, but loses its role in grammar and logic. Mora-Márquez offers us the first exhaustive analysis of the scholarly discussions around the notion of signification in the pre-nominalist medieval tradition.

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9789004298675

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Reviews

In this slim, dense, and heavily text-based book, Mora-Marquez traces the development of the semantic notion of signification (significatio) from its origins in two distinct Greek philosophical conceptions, semeion and symbolon, into a uniquely medieval concept. Because medieval philosophers drew from both logical and grammatical traditions when discussing signification, there is no unified conception of the notion that holds across the entire thirteenth century or in all relevant disciplines. Mora-Marquez teases out the differences, explains how they relate to each other, and identifies the roots of the differences... For the specialist, [this book] is a phenomenal resource, meticulously researched, interesting in content, and filling a very important gap in our understanding of semantic theory in the thirteenth century. Sara L. Uckelman, Speculum 92.4 (2017).

Author Information

Ana María Mora-Márquez, Ph.D. (2009), University Paris 1, is a researcher of medieval philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. She has published articles on medieval logic and semantics, including ‘Boethius of Dacia and Radulphus Brito on the Universal Sign “Every”’.

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