The emergence of the syntactic concept of phrase in Comenius

We owe the emergence of the linguistic idea of phrase to Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), in his "Grammatica Latino-vernacula" (Leszno, 1649). He proposes to use the stylistic term ‘phrasis’ with a new syntactic meaning, in order to indicate a group of words arranged in a hierarchical structure, which is an intermediate syntactic unit between the word and the sentence. This idea allows us to back-date by a century the discovery of the concept of 'groups of words', which is usually ascribed to Gabriel Girard (1677–1774) in 1747.