'Quis vel qui'. A controversial classification in Latin grammatical sources.

This paper deals with the treatment of some Latin forms sharing a qu- theme, namely the morphologically overlapping paradigms of what we call (in the Modern tradition) 1) the interrogative and indefinite pronoun quis ‘who?’ and ‘someone’; 2) its corresponding adjective or determiner qui with the same interrogative or indefinite values; and 3) the relative qui ‘who’. After a linguistic description of such forms, the collection of all the occurrences in the corpus represented by the Latin grammatical texts written from the 4th to the 7th century AD that constitute Keil’s edition of Grammatici Latini will be discussed, providing as much text and comment as possible. As the data show, the Latin grammatical tradition appears to be split into two main streams: one is the tradition established by Donatus (4th century) and his followers, the other the position of Priscian (5th-6th century), theoretically modelled on the analysis of the Greek language provided by Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century AD). A preliminary issue concerns the classification of quis and qui within the part-of-speech system: Donatus, on the basis of a different ranking in the notion of person and definiteness, classed such forms among pronouns, whereas Priscian among nouns. Finally, a key issue concerning the metalinguistic treatment of the qu- forms in Latin will be discussed, namely the dependent nature of qui when it is used as a relative pronoun, explored in some depth by Priscian but neglected or totally omitted by all other authors of the Donatian tradition (except for occasional brief remarks not developed further).