3. Linguistics in the Renaissance period. Emergence of General rational grammar

parts (such as Ego accuso Petrum furti, I accuse Peter o f theft)
has a particular air o f continuity. So Guarino appears as the representative
o f a phase that was characterized by limited innovations but not by
an explicit criticism o f the medieval system o f grammatical description.
The basic text in which the Humanist attack against medieval grammar
takes place, and where in particular there is the awareness or the
illusion o f knowing how to rebuild the study o f Latin on an entirely
new basis, is undoubtedly the Elegantie by Lorenzo Valla, published in
1449 and printed for the first time in 1471.5 They are presented as an
advanced manual for the purpose o f learning fully the wealth o f communicative
possibilities within classical and post-classical Latin, which
modem people can bring back to life and even perfect.6 The work takes
its place in an intermediate area between grammar and rhetoric, in the
sense that it presupposes elementary notions and deals extensively with
stylistic questions, and in the sense that in the ideal curriculum which
Valla, drawing on Quintilian, has in mind, this manual belongs to the
school o f the teacher o f rhetoric, who continues the work of the teacher
o f grammar. The elegantia which provides the work’ s title is not, however,
an extrinsic formal quality (according to a misleading interpretation
that was to become established from the end o f the fifteenth century):
it is rather the most accurate selection o f the word or construction which
expresses precisely the particular shade o f meaning one is looking for.
The Latin language as a whole, by combining a functional lexical richness
with a similarly functional richness o f morphological and syntactical
distinctions, has an unequalled semantic power (in particular:
unequalled by Greek). V a lla ’ s keen interest in legal language is a good
example o f the way the restoration o f correct Latinity is o f fundamental
importance, in his view, for the working o f civil society in Europe, as
well as for the development and even the existence o f all the sciences.
Since the purpose o f the Elegantie is to bring to light again the exact,
distinct semantic value o f a large number o f near-synonyms, o f morphological
allotropes and o f apparently equivalent constructions, it is understandable
that the work has seemed to be an accumulation o f lexical,
morphological and syntactic observations, without any clear structure. In
actual fact the structure is clear: Book I analyses morphemes (desinences
and suffixes) in the area o f nouns and verbs; Book II analyses the other