Syntactic Prescriptions in Practice

Continuing a tradition from antiquity, Byzantine linguistic literature is often concerned with the lexicon or, at most, the relationship between singular words and their closest neighbours. In keeping with this, a lot of the modern research on Byzantine linguistics and language learning deals with lexicography and similar topics. Nonetheless, there are examples of how Byzantine grammarians discuss wider and more purely syntactic phenomena, such as word order or other aspects of the arrangement of phrases. Taking such discussions as a starting-point, this paper tries to reveal connections between theory and practice, that is how normative syntactic statements of the grammarians correspond to actual Byzantine usage and the development of this usage.