In this paper some methodological convergences between ancient grammar and generative linguistics are highlighted. Classical reception clearly appears in the idea that the faculty of language be innate, the conception of a universal grammar, and the naturalist hypothesis. In addition to these basic theoretical postulates of ancient thought, the analysis also emphasizes a substantial continuity in generative practice with the ancient grammatical technique which assigned to the parts of speech a central role for morphosyntactic analysis. Finally, the paper highlights the substantial continuity in the conception of grammar as a system of rules and the search for the computational mechanisms that the human mind applies in language processing, with particular reference to Varro’s mathematical concept of analogy.
