Le parti del discorso incontrano la retorica: alla ricerca della sintassi, nella continuità tra Medioevo ed Età moderna

There are several gaps in the history of linguistics; furthermore, several positions are still defended that no longer correspond with the state of the art. The project aims at assessing the analysis of the field of syntax, which, contrary to what one may find in literature, belonged to the speculation on language and to the field of interplay of grammar, rhetorics, logic even in the earliest phases of the modern age. It is commonly accepted that the discussion on syntax is one of the objects of study of modern scholarship, starting with the Port Royal School, whose scholars separated grammar from logic and focused on the clause and on syntax altogether. The specific researches carried out on the glosses, seen here as a cognitive reflection, as well as on the work of the Modistae and of the scholastic philosophers and grammarians, demonstrate a special interest in the interphrastic roles and in the partes orationis. The study of the Anglosaxon and Irish glosses, of the Irish grammar, of the late medieval grammatical treatises, of Dante's thoughts on the role of grammar and vulgar Italian is the premise for an alternative assessment of the linguistic and rhetoric historiography that does not deny the centrality of syntax in the modern age.