The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification: The Discussions and their Origin and Development

In The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification, Ana Maria Mora-Marquez presents an exhaustive study of the three 13th-century discussions explicitly dealing with the notion of Significatio. Her study aims to show that the three discussions emerge because of apparently opposite claims about the signification of words in the authoritative literature of the period, namely in Aristotle, Boethius and Priscian. It also shows that the three discussions develop in the same direction - towards a unified use of the notion of signification, which keeps its explanatory role in semiotics, but loses its role in grammar and logic. Mora-Marquez offers us the first exhaustive analysis of the scholarly discussions around the notion of signification in the pre-nominalist medieval tradition.