Searching for syntax in the history of medieval linguistic thought

Abstract

The present volume contains selected papers from the international conference on “The submerged syntax between Late Antiquity and the Modern Age. Sources, models, and interpretative strategies”, that took place in Palermo, 28-29 November 2019, hosted by the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo. The conference was organized under the umbrella of a project of national relevance funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, named “Parts of speech meet rhetorics: searching for syntax in the continuity between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age” (PRIN 20172F2FEZ, funded from January 2020). The approach that unifies this volume is mostly related to the reconstruction of the medieval syntactic thought, which was developed on the basis of ancient grammarians descriptions. Indeed, as has been recently remarked, the ancient Apollonius Dyscolus’ grammatical theory of syntax, which was received in the Middle Ages through the Latin Grammar of Priscian, «established itself as the foundation of the Western theory of syntax » (Luthala 2020: 23). However, although in particular Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae contained many syntactic insights, they offer neither a coherent syntactic theory nor a specific metalanguage for syntax (Kneepkens 1990: 140; Vineis & Maierù 1990: 114). Also, following the classical grammarian’s approach, Priscian’s model of syntax was wordbased, thus ultimately relying on dependency-oriented rather than constituency- oriented approaches (Law 2003: 91). For this reason, the papers presented here aim at tracing back to emergent syntactic notions in the history of Western thought, through the analysis of specific key terms used in the medieval tradition. In fact, the hypothesis according to which the syntactic concept of subordination and the opposition between main and dependent clause were introduced for the first time by the foundational contribution of Port-Royal Grammar (1660), thus starting from the modern age (Graffi 2019: 87-88; 2021: 35), seems no longer tenable (cf. Cotticelli Kurras 2004: 135; 2021: 69ff.; see also Bartolotta 2022).