Clause relations in Ancient Greek Grammatical tradition?

The paper presents some considerations on the use and meaning of some terms in the Ancient Greek grammatical and rhetorical tradition with reference to the metalinguistic sphere of the syntax. In a recent study on the use and distribution of the ancient terms σύνταξις, σύνθεσις, παράταξις, ὑπόταξις and their semantic root-related terms in a specific metalinguistic employment (Cotticelli-Kurras, 2017), it has been observed that they did not have a direct continuation in modern terminology and concepts of subordination. Furthermore, there seems to be no specific grammatical use of the terms παράταξις and παρατακτικός in Greek Antiquity. Some scholars have asserted that the two Aristotelian expressions λέξις εἰρομένη for parataxis and λέξις κατεστραμμένη for hypotaxis could show terminological and conceptual correspondences to the modern concepts of the syntactical relations of ‘subordination’ and ‘coordination’. Such terms will represent the object of this investigation. To a certain extent, the sentence relations of dependency seemed to be expressed through the terms παρατιθέναι, παρατίθεσθαι (or παρακεῖσθαι -though παρακείμενος means “Perfect (tense)”), and παράθεσις, as can be argued from the index in the edition and commentary of Apollonius Dyscolus’ Syntax by Lallot (1997) and from the lexicon of ancient Greek grammatical terms by Becares Botas (1987). It is possible that the spoken concepts are not expressed through the term ὑπόταξις, which was introduced into the linguistic metalanguage by later linguists of the 19th century (Cotticelli-Kurras, 2016 [2017]). The main question to be investigated is whether or not the concepts of “hypotaxis” and “parataxis” belonged to the sphere of syntactic relations in terms of sentence dependence in ancient Greek and to show how the metalinguistic terminology for the field of syntax developed over time.