Une petite histoire de la notion d’autoteleia (complétude) dans la tradition grecque
Résumé
This paper deals with a Greek item which played an important rolein at least three domains: philosophy, rhetoric and grammar: autoteleia, whichis traditionally translated by completeness and which is regularly present in thevarious and traditional definitions of sentence, always supposed to be ‘completein itself’. The paper browses through a lot of occurrences of the Greek termsbelonging to the lexical family of autoteleia, mainly the adjective autotele:s,which were conceptualised first in philosophy by the Stoics to caracterize thelogical proposition. It appears that more than completeness, autoteleia meansautonomy and self-sufficiency of a proposition. It is exactly what is at stake inthe grammatical use of these terms, particularly in Apollonius Dyscolus’ works,where it appears that, far from being a fuzzy idea, the notion of self-sufficiencyplays a precise and essential role in the syntactic description of the sentence.