Wyrażanie obowiązku w traktacie De officiis M.T. Cycerona
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Date
2011
Authors
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Publisher
Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk
Title alternative
The expression of obligation in Cicero’s De officiis
Abstract
This article attempts to distinguish various language markers of obligation used in Cicero’s De officiis. The
tentative list of means which serve to express obligation in chosen text includes (1) morphological markers,
such as: the imperative and subjunctive moods, the future tense; (2) lexical means: the modal verbs debere and
oportet, the impersonal phrases officium est and munus est, the performative verbs postulo and hortor, and (3)
syntactic markers: the periphrastic gerundival construction and the est + genetivus possessivus construction.
However all these grammatical and lexical means may express the notions of deontic necessity only under the
specific circumstances.
Description
Modality, understood as a language category determining the speaker’s attitude towards the
communicated content, can be divided into several types. One of them is deontic modality which
relates to the notions of permission and obligation. The speech acts by means of which a speaker
imposes an obligation upon the addressee are called directives. A speaker can express the necessity
of realization of a state of affairs by addressee explicitly, refering to him directly, or implicitly,
by means of the general expressions which lack an explicit agent. These general expressions may
constitute directives only under specific conditions, first of all when the expression is marked by
a present or a future tense and when the deontic source of the obligation and the addressee are indicated
in some way. In Cicero’s De officiis explicit directives are realised with morphological means,
such as the imperative mood, the first person plural subjunctive, the second person singular and first
person plural future indicative, and with lexical ones: the performative verbs postulo and hortor.
Whereas implicit directives are expressed by morphological means: the third person subjunctive
and the third person future indicative, by lexical markers: the modal verbs debere and oportet, the
impersonal phrases officium est and munus est, and by syntactic means: the periphrastic gerundival
construction and the est + genetivus possessivus construction. However particular markers much
differ with respect to their frequency in chosen corpus.
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Keywords
Cicero, Modality, Deontic modality, Obligation, Markers of obligation, De officiis
Citation
Symbolae Philologorum Posnaniensium, 2011, nr XXI/2, s. 5-26
ISBN
978-83-7654-181-5