Accidents

This chapter addresses the ‘accidents’ of words. As defined in the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, ‘accidence’ is ‘that part of grammar which deals with variable forms of words (inflections etc.)’. As envisaged in antiquity, the accidentia included any property described as varying, ‘accidentally’ in a sense that went back to Aristotle, between instances of what was in essence the same part of an utterance. A word whose essential character was that of a noun could be compound or it could be simple: this was one criterion, therefore, by which nouns as forms were divided into subclasses. A further ‘accident’ of verbs, as listed in the manuals of both Donatus and Dionysius, was that of conjugation: in Greek suzugia, in Latin coniugatio. This was defined in Greek as a ‘consecutive modification of verbs’, within what is in modern terms a paradigm.