Grice ed Espinosa: Si deve cooperare

 Since Homer, prosôpon [πϱόσωπоν], etymologically “what is opposite the gaze,” has designated the human “face” in particular, and then, metaphorically, the “façade” of a building, and synechdochically, the whole “person” bearing the face. Another remarkable semantic extension is that of the theatrical “mask” (Aristotle, Poetics 1449a36), leading in turn to the meaning “character in a drama” (Alexandrian stage directions for dramatic works regularly included the list of the prosôpa tou dramatos [πϱόσωπα τоῦ δϱάματоς]), and then to a narrative. Its Latin equivalent, persona, refers in its turn to the mask that makes the voice resonate (personare), before it designates a character, a personality, and a grammatical person (Varro). The meaning of the compound prosôpopoiein [πϱоσωπо-πоιεῖν]—“to compose in direct discourse,” that is, to make the characters speak themselves—clearly shows that the dramatic meaning of prosôpon had a particularly great influence on the history of the word. In any event, it seems quite likely that when grammarians adopted prosôpon to designate the grammatical “person,” they were thinking of the dialogue situation characteristic of the theatrical text, which makes use of the alternation “I-you”: the face-to-face encounter between person(age)s is rooted in the category of the “person” (see SUBJECT, Box 6). Whereas terms like “tense” (chronos [χϱόνоς]) and “case” (ptôsis [πτῶσις]) are attested before they appear in strictly grammatical texts, this is not the case for prosôpon used to refer to the “person” as a linguistic category. On the other hand, in the earliest grammatical texts, and in a way that remains perfectly stable later on, prosôpon is adopted to describe both the protagonists of the dialogue and the marks, both pronomial and verbal, of their inscription in the linguistic material. In fact, the main difficulty encountered by grammarians regarding the notion of prosôpon seems to have been how properly to articulate reference to real persons occupying differentiated positions in linguistic exchange (speaker, addressee, other) with reference to the person as a grammatical mark. This difficulty occurs notably in a quarrel about definition. In the Technê attributed to Dionysius Thrax (Grammatici Graeci 1.1 [chap. 13, p. 51.3 Uhlig = 57.18 Lallot]), the verbal accident of prosôpon is defined as follows: Prosôpa tria, prôton, deuteron, triton; prôton men aph’ hou ho logos, deuteron de pros hon ho logos, triton de peri hou ho logos [Пϱόσωπα τϱία, πϱῶτоν, δεύτεϱоν, τϱίτоν· πϱῶτоν μὲν ἀφ’ оὗ ὁ λόγоς, δεύτεϱоν δὲ πϱὸς ὃν ὁ λόγоς, τϱίτоν δὲ πεϱὶ оὗ ὁ λόγоς]. There are three persons: first, second, third. The first is the one from whom the utterance comes, the second, the one to whom it is addressed, the third, the one about whom he is speaking. This minimal definition clearly sets forth the two protagonists of the dialogue, distinguishing them by their position in the exchange, and introduces without special precaution a third position, characterized as constituting the subject matter of the utterance. The parallelism of the three definitions—a simple pronoun for each “person”—masks the lack of symmetry between the (real) first and second persons and the third person; the latter, as Benveniste pointed out (Problèmes de linguistique générale, 228), may very well not be a “person” in the strictest sense. This definition, which remained canonical for several centuries, was attacked by Apollonius Dyscolus, who completed it as follows (I adopt the formulation in Choeroboscos [Grammatici Graeci 4.2 (p. 10.27 Uhlig)], a Byzantine witness to the Alexandrian master): Prôton men aph’ hou ho logos peri emou tou prosphônountos, deuteron de pros hon ho logos peri autou tou prosphônoumenou, triton de peri hou ho logos mête prosphônountos mête prosphônoumenou [πϱῶτоν μὲν ἀφ’ оὗ ὁ λόγоς πεϱὶ ἐμоῦ τоῦ πϱоσφωνоῦντоς, δεύτεϱоν δὲ πϱὸς ὃν ὁ λόγоς πεϱὶ αὐτоῦ τоῦ πϱоσφωνоυμένоυ, τϱίτоν δὲ πεϱὶ оὗ ὁ λόγоς μήτε πϱοσφωνοῦντος μήτε πϱоσφωνоυμένоυ].) The first person is the one from whom the utterance comes meaning me, the speaker, the second, the one who to whom the utterance is addressed meaning the addressee himself, the third the one about whom the utterance speaks and who is neither the speaker nor the addressee. Apollonius’s arrangement contributes useful explanations: (a) each “person,” including the first two, can be the subject of the utterance; (b) the third is defined negatively as being neither the first nor the second (which implicitly opens up the possibility that it is a “person” only in an extended sense, insofar as it does not need to be competent as an interlocutor); (c) the overlap of enunciation and enunciated is explicit: there is a first person when the utterance refers to the enunciator-source, a second person when it refers to the addressee, and a third when it refers to someone or something else. Despite the incontestable advance represented by Apollonius’s revision, it nonetheless leaves an ambiguity regarding the designatum of prosôpon: are we talking about extralinguistic entities, “persons” engaging in dialogue or not, or are we talking about linguistic entities, “accidents” of the conjugated verb and the pronomial paradigm (personal pronouns)? Apparently the former, which is surprising coming from a grammarian who prides himself on correcting another grammarian. In fact, there is hardly any doubt that in Apollonius, the ambiguity I mentioned is still attached to the term prosôpon. Consider the following text, taken from Apollonius’s Syntax 3.59 (Grammatici Graeci 2.2 [p. 325.5–7 Uhlig]): Ta gar meteilêphota prosôpa tou pragmatos eis prosôpa anemeristhê, peripatô, peripateis, peripatei [τά γὰϱ μετειληφότα πϱόσωπα τоῦ πϱάγματоς εἰς πϱόσωπα ἀνεμεϱίσθη, πεϱιπατῶ, πεϱιπατεῖς, πεϱιπατεῖ]. The persons who take part in the act [of walking] are distributed into persons: I walk, you walk, he/she walks. We can interpret this to mean that in a group of persons—extralinguistic entities— who are walking, every utterance concerning the walk will elicit the appearance of verb endings distributing the walkers among the three grammatical persons: such is the alchemy of Apollonius’s prosôpon. Jean Lallot BIBLIOGRAPHY Benveniste, Émile. “Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe.” Chap. 18 in Problèmes de linguistique générale, 225–36. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Translation by M. A. Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Grammatici Graeci. Edited by A. Hilgard, R. Schneider, G. Uhlig, and A. Lentz. Leipzig: Teubner, 1878–1902. Reprint, Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1965. Lallot, Jean. La grammaire de Denys le Thrace. Paris: Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1998.