Introduction

The contributions contained in this volume offer a multidisciplinary approach into the history of the parts of speech and their role in building phrases and sentences. They fulfill a current interest for syntactic problems for combining recent linguistic theories with the long tradition of the Classical studies. The studies cover a chronological range reaching from Aristotle to Priscian and deal with concepts like ῥῆμα and λóγος, or the two Aristotelian expressions λέξις εἰρομένη and λέξις κατεστραμμένη as well as διάβασις and μετάβασις in Apollonius Dyscolos and the corresponding Latin term transitio and finally the Latin pronouns qui or quis. Through the metalinguistic approach the authors tackle syntactic structures like dependency or government, syntactic features or properties such as transitivity or subject and predicate or the development of the syntactic role of pronouns in introducing relative sentences. Furthermore, in providing testimonies of the historical existence of the controversy anomaly-analogy, the history of this quarrel is drawn from the Alexandrinian tradition to the Latin one with emphasis on the studium grammaticae as a development of an independent field of study.