Części mowy w gramatyce grecko-rzymskiej. Kształtowanie się klasyfikacji od starożytności do XX wieku

The author of the paper verifies a common belief that the traditional classification of ten parts of speech – five of them being open-class and inflected (noun, adjective, pronoun, numeral and verb), and five closed-class uninflected (adverb, preposition, conjunction, exclamation and particle) – is taken from the Greco-Roman grammar. Indeed, this two-class typology has its roots in the Antiquity, but the number of the classes and the classification itself differ from the one mentioned above. The development of lexical classification in the Greek and the Latin grammar led to the emergence of eight parts of speech, staying only in a partial correspondence between the two languages. Even the 19th and 20th-century grammars of Greek or Latin, which were composed under a strong influence of the grammatical descriptions of Modern Time languages, and which included a classification of the parts of speech that was a modified version of the Antique list, propose a wide spectrum of typologies. An examination of these typologies leads the author to the conclusion that among all kinds of classifications of lexical items proposed for Latin or Greek, either in the Antique era or today, no classification like the one mentioned at the very beginning of this text is to be found.