De Nebrija a Alarcos pasando por El Brocense

This article demonstrates the validity of the succinct general overview of the history of grammar from Antiquity to his time outlined by Prof. Alarcos Llorach at the beginning of his Structural Grammar (according to the Copenhagen School and with special attention to the Spanish language) and his success in pointing out that the main problems of normative grammar were the following two: on the one hand, the error of identifying grammatical categories with logical ones, and, on the other, the belief that the valid categories in the Greek language or Latin were projected in other languages. The work shows that, although our researcher makes this statement through Nebrija and without mentioning El Brocense, however, the reality is that his approach is generally valid, since both humanists commit the two errors detected by him. What's more, despite the preeminence of the second over the first as a linguist, however, there is no shortage of issues, such as the conventionality of language, in which the Andalusian grammarian is much more correct than the Extremaduran. The research, in short, demonstrates that, only when scholars freed themselves from the problems detected by Prof. Alarcos could the door of structural grammar be opened with the necessary rigor.