Metaphors in Medieval metalanguage: The body in the parts of speech

Abstract

Starting from the 7th century, there is a dramatic shift from the metalanguage inherited from the ancient and early Christian scholars to new metalinguistics tags. In this sense, the Grammarians had to offer new criteria for understanding the word and its syntactic and morphological relationship as a physical entity with a clearly analysable structure. Such analyses highlighted the presence of significant metalinguistic lacunae paving the way to new approaches for examining the sentence and the words in their minimal semantic units. In this frame of studies, metaphors represent a useful strategy for explaining the different Parts of Speech, highlighting the contribution to the history of syntactic theories of the grammarians from the early Middle Ages.