Some Remarks on Syntax Thought and Terminology in Early-Modern Quechua Missionary Grammars

The aim of this study is to investigate the development of early-modern syntactic thought on hierarchical grammatical relations, namely dependency and government, as emerging from the first Jesuit missionary grammarians’ works describing South American indigenous languages, around the beginning of the 17th century. The final scope of the investigation is to contribute to the reconstruction of the history of Western linguistic theory, by clarifying to what extent missionary grammarians contributed to the conceptualization of some syntactic notions involving dependency and government, before the successive codification by Port-Royal grammarians. In particular, I will mainly focus on the terminology used within selected early Quechua missionary grammars, namely Gramática y arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el Perú, llamada lengua Qquichua, o lengua del Inca (1607) by Diego González Holguín (1560–1618), and Arte de la lengua quichua (1619) by Diego de Torres Rubio (1547–1638), comparing them with the Quechua grammars of their missionary predecessors. Despite the lack of explicitly dedicated syntax sections as well as a systematic dependency theory, early Quechua grammars show innovative terminological uses through which the missionary approach to syntax proves to be quite aware, in terms of structural order, of notions such as determination, i.e. dependency and government, in describing the role of the verb within a sentence, the relation between different (main/dependent) clauses, and that between different words and phrases, as it emerges from many remarks within the sections devoted to specific parts of speech, i.e. prepositions, and other linguistic forms and categories.