La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig

Finck and Helwig, the authors of Grammatica Latina (1615), consider dis­course (clause or sentence) to be the expression of a mental verb (verbum mentis), just as dictio is the expression of a mental term. Etymology sets out the properties of different parts of speech; syntax establishes word concate­nation rules and speci­fies word order in the linguistic chain. This word order is natural only in the sense that it reflects the dependency relations between words, but it also comprises the latitude allowed by usage, without however challenging the established structural relations.