2025 Theses Doctoral

Dante, Philosopher of Language: Performing Pragmatics and Semantics in the "Commedia"

DiNardo, Laura

This dissertation employs the theoretical frameworks afforded by the twentieth- and twenty-first century discipline of analytic philosophy to move beyond previous readings of Dante and language and to more fully excavate the poet’s philosophy of language as it emerges in the Commedia, with specific focus on his technical interest in semantics and pragmatics. I show across four chapters that the Commedia engages in theorizing language most often when it isn’t overtly and explicitly doing so. Rather, Dante’s theory of language is enacted and performed throughout the text such that he effectively uses linguistic structures as a means to say something about human communication.

The first chapter takes De vulgari eloquentia 1.2–3 as the starting point of its analysis to establish and historically situate the theories of communication and meaning posited therewithin. Dante’s understanding of human communication and meaning in the linguistic treatise proves central for the chapters that follow for it positions the De vulgari eloquentia as an essential stepping stone toward his fullest expression of a philosophy of language in the Commedia, where issues of semantics and pragmatics take center stage in episodes that foreground linguistic concerns. Chapters 2 through 4 isolate in turn one major linguistic phenomenon and its central proponent(s) in analytic philosophy of language to demonstrate specifically how Dante nuances these concerns throughout the poem. In doing so, I do not seek to establish an equivalency to modern theories, but rather to show the productiveness of their vocabulary and methodologies in uncovering the philosophy of language he performs in the text.

Chapter 2 begins by establishing the important presence of embodied, dialogic language in the Commedia, utilizing the communicative theories of H. P. Grice to demonstrate how Dante-poet uses linguistically and dialogically dense episodes to further develop the pragmatic aspects of his philosophy from the De vulgari eloquentia. Chapter 3 then zooms in further on one component of pragmatics, analyzing the phenomenon of speech acts as conceived in the work of J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words. Here I highlight Dante-poet’s acute awareness of the ability of speech to generate action, so much so that language is posited as that which operationalizes motion throughout the text.

Finally, Chapter 4 develops a framework to better understand Dante’s employment of conditional statements across the three cantiche, placing them in conversation with the proposals of Robert Stalnaker to underscore the poet’s linguistic theory of possibility as a key mechanism that establishes the truth value of the reality and realism of the poem. Through a sustained focus on central concerns of semantics and pragmatics in the discipline of philosophy of language past and present—as manifested through conversational exchange and implicature, speech acts, and conditional statements—I demonstrate the deep-seated and highly technical nature of Dante’s theorizing in the Commedia. I contend he is able to generate a theory through practice by enacting his own philosophy of language across the text, thus positioning himself as a true philosopher of language.