Syntactic cases and lexical cases

Abstract

The difference between grammatical or syntactic cases and lexical or semantic cases is a repeated place in modern Grammar. The recent Grammar clearly separates syntactic functions and semantic functions: one thing is the subject, object and predicate syntactic functions, and other is the agent, patient, receiver… semantic function. The Grammar called structural also distinguished between syntax and semantics, but applying this distinction to those cases in which names can appear: there are syntactic cases and cases that, apart from their syntactic function, also have semantic values, it means, cases that mean something just because they are that case: the dative, interest; the ablative, external circumstance. Well then, we can already find this doctrine it already in a large grammatical tradition that began with Prisciano. I attempt with this work to verify the aforementioned matter, analysing this point in some medieval and Renaissance grammatical works.