La nascita di alcuni termini metalinguistici dal lessico medico greco: il caso di arthron.

In ch. 20 of Aristotle’s Poetics, the term árthron occurs among the parts of speech probably for the first time in the literature.Although several influential studies have been conducted on the subject with special attention to this controversial chapter of Poetics (Pagliaro 1954, Melazzo 2002), a univocal interpretation of the term árthron as conceived by Aristotle has not yet been worked out in much detail.The current interpretation of this term as ‘article’ is a legacy of the grammatical tradition following Aristotle. Such tradition pointed out the link between árthron and the semantic field of ‘articulation’, which crucially draws on the lexicon of medicine and biology. However, the metalinguistic terminology preceding systematisation reveals that this is only one of the several meanings of the term.In Poetics, árthron is defined first and foremost as phōnḗ ásēmos, namely ‘meaningless sound’. As Antonino Pagliaro (1954) remarked, árthron does not seem to refer to a definite object – or, more specifically, to any of the parts of speech – but it is more likely to indicate a relation. Hence, the term should be regarded as closer to the category of ptṓsis (inflection) than that of sýndesmos (the ‘combiner’, cf. Swiggers & Wouters 2002: 104), in which latter case it is often subject to semantic ambiguity both in the ancient sources and in the modern interpretations.