Expositio in the Middle Age grammars and commentaries

The present paper is aiming at illustrating the Latin term of expositio in its different uses from the classical and Late Latin grammars until to the medieval commentaries and grammarians. The term has been especially employed to denominate the technique for analysing the syntax of citations from classical, biblical or Medieval texts. The procedure consisted in the par- aphrase (expositio) of the examples using the so-called semantic glosses, explaining the meaning, as well the syntactic glosses, which gave correspon- dences of the syntax through a simplified grammatical structure. Furthermore, expositio was also used in the field of the logic in the formulation of logical propositions (Kneepkens 1987a, vol 1: 643). Since the technique implied in the expositio is dealing with glosses interpretation, both lexical and syntacti- cal, the paper is dedicated to the honored friend and colleague Diego Poli, who is a master in the analysis of glossing in Irish and Latin ME texts