Syntactic models in western grammar writing: from Cases to Functions

Abstract

This article aims to investigate, throughout the history of syntax, the rhetorical and descriptive movements that led Western grammar writing from an analysis based on Latin cases to one based on syntactic functions. This study follows the approach suggested by Colombat et al. (2017, p. 129), who argue that logical analysis of propositions was systematically applied in the grammars of modern European languages only from the 17th century onward, with the French rationalists of Port-Royal. The disciplinary foundation of this research is the Historiography of Linguistics (Swiggers, 2009a; Koerner, 2020), with particular focus on the historiography of grammar writing (Swiggers, 2020; among others). The results indicate that the ambivalence of the category ‘case’, understood as both a flexional and a logical-semantic phenomenon since Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana [Castilian Grammar] (1492), was only finally resolved by French grammar writers in the mid-18th century, leading to the replacement of a syntax model based on cases with one based on functions. This study opens an important investigative path: to explore the repercussions of the shift in syntactic models from cases to functions in the continuity of Western grammaticography, especially in the grammars of Portuguese.