The study of Greek and Roman language science has figured prominently in the remarkable renascence of interest in the history of linguistics of the last twenty years. We know more now than we did several decades ago about what the Greeks and Romans were thinking, writing, and doing in matters grammatical, and the scholars who contribute to this volume are among the ones who are responsible for that happy circumstance. The contents of this book bear ample testimony to the enhanced and enlarged understanding and appreciation of ancient grammar that we now enjoy. Each article in this volume has something new to say about the history of linguistics in the classical period, and each author insists that we need to return to ancient texts time and time again and that we need to read them even more carefully. The rethinking so conspicuous in much of the recent scholarship in this field is pointing in the direction of a new historiographical model of Greek and Latin linguistic science. The text of this volume has also been published in "Historiographia Linguistica "XIII:2/3

This volume contains papers on linguistic historiography ranging chronologically from ancient Greece to the present, and covering philosophical, social and political aspects of language as well as the study of grammar in the narrow sense. The work opens with the report on a round-table discussion of problems in translating ancient grammatical texts. The remainder of the volume is arranged in chronological sections, with contributions as follows. II. Classical and Medieval; III. Seventeenth Century; IV. Eighteenth Century; V. Nineteenth Century; VI. Twentieth Century.

This comprehensive history of linguistics is part of a 5 volume set. Together, the volumes examine the social, cultural and religious functions of language, its place in education, the prestige attached to different varieties of language, and the presentation of lexical and grammatical descriptions. They explore the linguistic interests and assumptions of individual cultures in their own terms, without trying to transpose and reshape them into the context of contemporary ideas of what the scientific study of language ought to be. The authors of individual chapters are all specialists who have been able to analyse the primary sources, and so produce original syntheses which offer an authoritative view of the different traditions and periods. Volume Two examines the Greek, Roman and Medieval European traditions, which between them developed the grammatical and syntactical models which form the basis of our inherited linguistic assumptions.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages, the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon, grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result, the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure, the diverse functions of grammatical categories, linguistic complexity, agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier, supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.

A joke, one might think, knowing that ancient grammar famously lacked a syntactic component. Not so, say the scholars: the very absence of the category syntax calls for theoretical and historical analysis, and a scratch at the surface reveals that ancient grammarians did indeed recognize and deal with various aspects of syntax. The 16 papers, five of them in English and the others in German or French, look at syntactic description and reflection in antiquity, Alexandrian grammarians and syntax, virtues and vices of speech, and the Latin and Byzantine heritage. Distributed by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

"The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics examines ancient, medieval, post-renaissance and modern conceptions of linguistics (i.e. the study of language and languages). It identifies a classical tradition extending from Ancient Greece to the twenty-first century which has spread from Europe to the other four inhabited continents. It is a story of successive stages of language study, each building upon, or reacting against, the preceding period."--BOOK JACKET.

The volume assembles about 50 contributions presented at the Intenational Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, held in Rome, March 2015. This Colloquium opened a new series of international conferences that has replaced previous national meetings on this subject. They embrace essential topics of Ancient Greek Linguistics with different theoretical and methodological approaches: particles and their functional uses; phonology; tense, aspect, modality; syntax and thematic roles; lexicon and onomastics; Greek and other languages; speech acts and pragmatics.