| Summary: | The promotion, since the seventies, of late middle ages to the rank of important moment in the history of philosophy of language has been in part fuelled by the acknowledgment of the affinities of their “theories of properties of terms” with logical approaches developed after Frege and Russell. More recently, studies of medieval analyses of speech acts, as they are carried out for instance in theology, have revealed another parallel between the two periods, involving this time the ‘ordinary language philosophers’ of the second half of the 20th-century. In short, we are faced on the one hand with a main logical paradigm displaying elements of a formal semantics, and on the other with an ability to develop pragmatic devices to handle ordinary language issues arising elsewhere (in theological contexts, for instance). To complete the picture, one must add an old awareness that sometimes what the author of a sentence means is different from what the sentence says on the sole basis of the meanings of its components – knowing that logic should only take the latter into account. In short, here are all the elements for a semantics versus pragmatics scenario to take place. Unfortunately for the historian of philosophy (or logic), sameness of devices or, even, issues, between two distant sets of theories does not amount to sameness of ‘projects’ – ambitions, objectives, principles, constraints: the kind of sameness which would allow to straightforwardly declare the theory of properties of terms a formal semantics of ideal language opposed, say, to a pragmatics of ordinary language. The aforementioned affinities nevertheless provide an opportunity to tackle a specific aspect of the medieval ‘terminist’ project, namely its borders, as they were drawn, implicitly – through analytic choices – or explicitly, by 13th and 14th-century authors. Apprehended in terms of intra-linguistic versus extra-linguistic features, semantic versus pragmatic considerations, the borders offer varying degrees of porosity and mobility, from the integration of speaker’s freedom to the requirement of linguistic anchoring, to the use of different forms of intention or voluntas. The picture is that of an ever changing balance between the will to take into account a large range of semantic phenomena and the ambition to systematically anchor them at the level of linguistic properties. However changing the balance, though, it always settle within the scope of the theory of properties of terms, whose rules might be reinterpreted, or even enhanced, but never ignored.
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