One More Thing

Abstract

A medieval pragmatic orientation in grammar emerged from both theoretical and practical knowledge. Medieval pragmatic approaches to language actualized an alternate (Laclau and Mouffe [2000] would say “antagonistic”) hegemony, a discursive space of thinking differently about language, meaning, and communication. Pragmatically oriented grammarians reanalyzed many examples of (propositional) speech found in medieval logic texts and more formalist grammatical writing and arrived at different conclusions. They found descriptive value and analytic productivity in what others regarded as fallacies and errors. In effect, pragmatically oriented grammarians actualized as meaningful potential alternatives in the linguistic system. Some of those alternatives are exemplified in poetic discourse and how heretics talk.