La ricezione dell'antichità classica nella grammatica generativa

In this paper some methodological convergences between ancient grammar and generative linguistics are highlighted. Classical reception clearly appears in the idea that the faculty of language be innate, the conception of a universal grammar, and the naturalist hypothesis. In addition to these basic theoretical postulates of ancient thought, the analysis also emphasizes a substantial continuity in generative practice with the ancient grammatical technique which assigned to the parts of speech a central role for morphosyntactic analysis. Finally, the paper highlights the substantial continuity in the conception of grammar as a system of rules and the search for the computational mechanisms that the human mind applies in language processing, with particular reference to Varro’s mathematical concept of analogy.