Brief philosophical-grammatical trajectory of the parts of speech (word classes) in the work of Dionysius Thrax

Abstract

That word classes – or, to use terms more specific to our proposal, “parts of speech” – are a contribution from the Greeks to us is something already known and attested by different authors and works, such as Borges Neto (2023), Azeredo (2021), Vieira (2018; 2015) and Neves (2005), to cite a very brief list. Even so, the theme is quite relevant and pertinent to our times, especially when we consider the linguistic-grammatical production of the 20th century and, even more particularly, of the 21st, with all the changes in perspective given by linguistics. Returning to the past, in a game of historiographical reading and interpretation (Kaltner, 2023; Gueiros and Vieira, 2022; Batista, 2019; Swiggers, 2019; Koerner, 2014), becomes, therefore, fundamental. Our text, therefore, aims to present a brief trajectory of the concept of parts of speech, in Dionysius Thrace, returning to its premises and bases to find in philosophical discourse the origins of this thought that is perpetuated and that, with modifications, persists even today (Vieira, 2018).