Aliquid amplius audire desiderat: desire in Abelard’s theory of incomplete and non-assertive complete sentences

One of the peculiarities of Peter Abelard’s analysis of incomplete and non-assertive sentences is his use of the notion of desire: in both Dialectica and Glosses on Peri hermeneias the terms desiderium and desidero move to the foreground side by side with optatio, expectatio, suspensio and the related verbs. Desire plays a structural role in Abelard’s descriptions of the compositional way in which the linguistic message is received, changing step by step from incomplete to complete: the person who receives the incomplete message desires to get further information through other words since he knows that the purpose of such words or sequences of words is to combine with other words in order to form a complete sentence. On the other hand, the expression of the speaker’s attention to his inner affections renders the same semantic content a different complete sentence