Grammar and lexicon in traditional grammarthe work of matthias kramer and johann joachim becher

In Methodvs didactica (1668) and other works Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) developed a theory of grammar which was based on the study of lexical, syntactic and semantic relations of words within the lexicon of a language. Matthias Kramer (1640-C.1730), in his many bilingual dictionaries, applied Becher’s grammatical theory to develop a general theory of linguistic analysis, studying the morphological relationships between roots, derivatives and/or compounds, synonymy between words, and the relationships of words in sentences and idioms in various languages. The paper demonstrates that Kramer’s approach effectively marks a breakaway from traditional grammar as still found in the works of Justus Georg Schottel (1612-1676), Kaspar Stieler (1632-1707), and others, because it applies an explicit grammatical. © 1994 John Benjamins Publishing Company.