Introduction

This volume gathers a selection of peer-reviewed papers developed from the international workshop The Emergence of Syntactic Categories in the History of Linguistics: From Medieval to Modern Age, held on 27-28 May 2024 at the University of Palermo, Italy. The workshop was organized under the auspices of the project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research: “Parts of Speech Meet Rhetorics: Searching for Syntax in the Continuity between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age” (SiRe PRIN 20172F2FEZ). The event brought together scholars working on the history of linguistics and philology, with a particular focus on the evolution of syntactic categories from Late Antiquity through the early modern period. The workshop aimed to address a significant lacuna in current linguistic historiography: the underexplored emergence and conceptualization of syntactic structures, particularly the theory of the ‘clause’ before the formulation of Port-Royal grammar in the mid-seventeenth century (cf. Cotticelli-Kurras 2023). Indeed, traditional accounts within the linguistic historiography have often assumed that concepts such as ‘main clause’ and ‘subordinate clause’ were absent from earlier grammatical traditions (cf. Graffi 1998). However, this assumption overlooks the complexity of earlier syntactic reflection. It is true that, although Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae offer valuable syntactic insights, they do not present a cohesive or systematic syntactic theory or a clearly defined metalanguage for discussing syntax. Adopting a word-based approach, Priscian’s model relied on a dependency-oriented rather than a constituency-oriented structure, significantly influencing later developments in linguistic theory. This legacy persisted into humanist and Renaissance grammars from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, including early grammars of ‘exotic’ languages, which, influenced by the Latin traditional model, primarily focused on morphology and the binary syntactic relationships between individual words, without yet articulating a clause-based system. The workshop aimed to address persistent gaps in linguistic historiography by investigating the emergence and development of syntactic categories from Late Antiquity to the grammatical theories preceding the Port-Royal Grammar of 1660. The articles included in this volume offer new critical perspectives on these issues, examining sources ranging from late antique Latin grammars to early modern vernacular and missionary linguistic works. Collectively, they shed light on the continuities, shifts, and innovations that characterize the prehistory of modern syntactic theory.