subaltern

Pluralsubalterns

1. 1
   nounBritishcountable

   A commissioned officer below the rank of captain, such as a lieutenant or second lieutenant.

   Fresh from Sandhurst, she joined the battalion as a subaltern and was given a platoon.

   The mess was loud with subalterns celebrating the end of the exercise.

   Note

   British army usage treats the word as a grouping, not a rank of its own: it covers lieutenants and second lieutenants alike. It often carries youth and low standing with it. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a runaway match is with a mere nobody, a subaltern in a foot regiment, and an age can follow the noun, as in a subaltern of 24.

2. 2
   adjective

   Lower in rank or position; secondary or inferior, and especially, in the military, holding a junior officer's rank below captain.

   After losing the leadership race, she was offered only a subaltern role in the new cabinet.

   Every subaltern officer in the battalion had to pass the same course before promotion to captain.

   Similarsubordinate

   Oppositesuperior, senior

   Note

   English took the adjective from Middle French subalterne, itself from Late Latin subalternus, built from sub- and alternus. Before officer it names the junior ranks below captain; elsewhere it marks a post as secondary, as when a defeated politician is offered only a subaltern position. In academic prose, subaltern groups points to the postcolonial noun: people outside power, not merely lower down a hierarchy.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   Someone of lower rank who works under another person's authority.

   No subaltern in the department dared to question the director's figures.

   The minister left the unpopular details to his subalterns and took the credit himself.

   Similarsubordinate, underling, junior

   Oppositesuperior

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A member of a group shut out, socially, politically and geographically, from the dominant power structure of both a colony and the colonial homeland.

   The novel gives its narrative voice to a subaltern, a landless laborer whose story the colonial records ignored.

   Her research recovers petitions written by subalterns who never appear in the official archive.

   Note

   Postcolonial theory uses the noun for whole classes as well as individuals, and then it takes the: a politics of the subaltern, sometimes set in quotation marks to flag a term of the theory. Subaltern Vision (2012) calls Mangala, who leads folk-medicine practitioners in Ghosh’s novel, a subaltern in every conceivable meaning of the term, playing the theorist’s sense against the plain subordinate.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   In logic, a proposition that is implied by a universal proposition.

   If a universal proposition is true, its subaltern must be true as well.

   On the square of opposition, each universal claim sits directly above its subaltern.

   Oppositesuperaltern

   Note

   Logicians use the noun relationally, and it comes naturally with a possessive: a universal proposition has its subaltern, and the subaltern has its superaltern above it on the square of opposition. Truth runs downhill only: if the superaltern holds, so does its subaltern, but a true subaltern proves nothing about the claim above it.

6. 6
   adjective

   Of a proposition, asserting only part of what a related proposition asserts.

   For each general premise, the students had to state the subaltern conclusion that follows from it.

   Her objection targeted the universal premise, so she left the subaltern claim untouched.

   Note

   Traditional logic uses the adjective for the weaker partner in a pair: from a universal claim such as All S are P follows the subaltern claim Some S are P, which asserts only part of it. It sits before proposition, claim or conclusion; used on its own as a noun, it becomes the logician’s subaltern.

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