[News] WSG: Ricardo Alcocer Urueta, "A morphosyntactic construal of "being" as understood by Plato and Aristotle" (26. 05.)

Sehr geehrte Kolleginnen und Kollegen, Ich würde Sie gerne auf den Vortrag von Dr. Ricardo Alcocer Urueta (Universität Wien, Institut für Philosophie) hinweisen, der kommende Woche in der Vortragsreihe der Wiener Sprachgesellschaft stattfindet: Titel: "A morphosyntactic construal of "being" as understood by Plato and Aristotle" Datum & Uhrzeit: Dienstag, 26.05., 18.00h Ort: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A, Hörsaal 1 (1. OG) Es gibt diesmal auch die Möglichkeit, online via Zoom dabei zu sein: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/61491797180?pwd=bHRaamebodpqCuOM4Lnh2WgnczqTD6.1 Meeting-ID: 614 9179 7180 Kenncode: 098246 Das Abstract finden Sie weiter unten im Anhang und auf der Homepage der WSG: https://wsg.univie.ac.at/veranstaltungen/ricardo-alcocer-urueta-a-morphosyn… Interessierte sind herzlich willkommen! Mit besten Grüßen, Laura Grestenberger ---------------------- A morphosyntactic construal of "being" as understood by Plato and Aristotle Abstract: The expression of the classical concept of being in philosophy, articulated through the Indo-European verbal copula par excellence (BE), operates at a syntactic level that transcends the distinctions that led Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others to regard this verb as ambiguous. My presentation connects “being”, as understood by Plato and Aristotle, with the morphosyntactic structures of Classical Greek. As a technical term in classical Greek philosophy, εἰμί ‘am’ (≈ BE) did not convey a predicate or part of a predicate, but grammatical categories marked on Classical Greek verbs. However, Plato and Aristotle did not see εἰμί as an inflectional support morpheme entirely devoid of semantic content. Since εἰμί remained unmarked for certain features operating above the predicate level throughout its grammaticalization, Plato and Aristotle, as Classical Greek speakers, believed that it constituted (what we could describe as) a default predication structure that need not be associated with an event in the strict sense. -- Ass.-Prof. Dr. Laura Grestenberger Universität Wien, Inst. für Sprachwissenschaft / University of Vienna, Dept. of Linguistics PI, EVOCAT (ERC-CoG, evocat.univie.ac.at) lauragrestenberger.com Wiener Sprachgesellschaft, wsg.univie.ac.at The PIE Women's Collective, pie-collective.com