Brief reflections on syntactic terminology in the grammaticography of the Portuguese language (16th-17th centuries).

Abstract

In this paper some expressions used by grammarians of the Portuguese language of the 16th and 17th centuries in the syntactic chapters of their grammars are studied from the point of view of grammatical terminology; namely, those that designate the main syntactic functions. For this purpose, the first part of the work presents a methodological framework on which the analysis of the selected syntactic terms is based. In the second part, considering some of the parameters established, the terms that designate the concepts related to the syntactic relations between the clause constituents are studied, trying to show, in the task of the historiographer of linguistics, the importance of understanding and interpretating grammatical terminology.