La formalisation de la notion de défectivité chez les grammairiens de l’Antiquité grecque et latine : étude en contexte des termes ellipês [ἐλλιπής] et defectiuus

Abstract

Context: Defectivity is generally defined as a grammatical phenomenon that refers to the morphological categorization of terms whose inflection is lacking with regards to their paradigm. In modern grammar, it is especially associated with "defective verbs". The Latin etymon of the term "defective" – defectiuus – and its Greek equivalent – ellipês [ἐλλιπής] – were found in the work of ancient Greek and Latin grammarians. However, these terms do not seem to have been studied in depth, despite numerous works on ancient grammatical terminology. Notably, the contributions of Greek grammarians to the phenomenon remain underexplored. Aims: (1) To determine the extent to which ancient Greek grammarians recognized and treated defectivity as a grammatical phenomenon (2) To determine whether ancient Greek and Latin grammarians applied defectivity to grammatical categories other than the verb. Method: 64 instances of the term ellipês (n=26) and defectiuus (n=38) extracted from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Library of Latin Texts were analyzed for several parameters, including: (1) the meaning of the terms in context - distinguishing between "non-technical" usage, where the term does not refer to defectivity in a grammatical sense, and "technical" usage, where it does (2) the grammatical categories and characteristics designated by these terms. Results: The Greek corpus contained only 3 technical instances of the term ellipês; the other instances (n=23) referred to either the rhetorical device named "ellipsis" or other more common referents. In contrast, a large majority (n=35) of the instances of the term defectiuus in the Latin corpus were technical. Across both corpora, the technical usage of the terms referred mainly to verbs but also included references to substantives. Conclusions: In the work of both Greek and Latin grammarians, defectivity is designated via a lexicalised term, which suggests a certain degree of formalization of the phenomenon. While the state of the Greek corpus does not allow for the same level of confidence in the results as the Latin corpus, the analyses show that the grammatical formalization of defectivity was similar. Defectivity was applied to verbs as well as substantives, which indicates that the phenomenon became restricted to verbs only at a later period.