Ars obligatoria: searching for the medieval roots of obligatoriness

ABSTRACT Our modern terminology and concepts are often based on much older linguistic discourses. A case in point is the alleged medieval roots of the modern term ars obligatoria that I discuss in this paper. The term appeared in a number of structuralist texts on the obligatoriness of grammatical categories, and it is repeatedly, albeit vaguely, ascribed to the Scholastics. In this paper, I review two hypotheses about the origins of this term. The only extant proposal argues that the term ars obligatoria does not refer to the obligatoriness of grammatical categories but alludes to the position of grammar as the first, fundamental and thus obligatory discipline within the system of the Seven Liberal Arts. Alternatively, I argue that the term refers to the medieval tradition of obligatory disputations, the so-called ars obligatoria. Just as a speaker must follow the grammatical rules of a language, so must a disputant follow the rules of the disputation.