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The teaching of syntax in the 13th-century university was based on the last two books of Priscian of Caesarea’s Institutiones Grammaticae (c.500 A.D.). Following the order proposed by Priscian, the medieval grammarian first studies orthography, which deals with the constituent parts of the word (dictio), then etymology, which is concerned with the word in itself (simpliciter) and its grammatical accidents, and finally diasynthetic or syntax, which discusses the construction of words as constituents of a sentence (oratio). Each of these particular sciences (orthography, etymology and diasynthetic) has its own particular subject, which is, as some philosophers believe, predicated of the subject of the general science according to the aim it purports to achieve. Written probably in the first half of the 1250s in an academic philosophical environment, the Communia super Priscianum minorem, a subsection and the culmination of the Communia super totam gramaticam, are interesting, among other things, in that they specify the epistemological relation that links syntax to the science of grammar in general. In a polemical effort to dismiss the sentence (oratio) as the subject of diasynthetic, the unknown author of the Communia opens the section of syntax with a discussion which aims to establish the “word in relation with another according to their accidental compatibility or incompatibility” as the real subject of syntax, doing so in a typically Aristotelian way.
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