William of Sherwood on Composition and Division: A Linguistic Study

María Luisa Rivero
University of Ottawa
Summary

This article presents a linguistic study of the views of the terminist logician William of Sherwood (c.1200-c.1266) on the six sources of fallacies based on language, and it concentrates in particular on his theories on Composition and Division. William of Sherwood distinguished three levels of representation in a sentence or in a word: a semantic aspect; a morpho-syntactic aspect; and a phonological-phonetic aspect. These three levels are not mentioned in earlier tracts, and differentiate William of Sherwood from other terminist logicians. A morpho-syntactic structure, corresponding to only one phonological structure, which correlates with two semantic representations, can lead to Equivocation or Amphibology. A morphosyntactic structure that has two phonological representations and two semantic structures, can cause the fallacies of Composition, Division, and Accent. In brief, Composition, Division, and Accent are related to strings that are identical as to their syntax, but which are pronounced in various ways. William of Sherwood correlated Composition and Division with optional patterns of intonation. In this respect he differs from a number of 12th century logicians who thought that Composition and Division were reflected in discourse by syntactic order, and who established a trend that continued throughout the Scholastic period.

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