  It is easy to see how such an account of meaning could lead to a bona fide theory of grammar, what Jan Pinborg called “the first systematic syntax developed in western  linguistics”.[10]  Indeed, speculative grammarians of both periods have attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers alike.[11]  But the stakes were higher for the Modistae because the influx of Aristotle's writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries forced everyone to think in terms of a new paradigm of knowledge. Could grammar be reconceived as the science of language (scientia sermocinalis)? The question here was whether grammar could count as an Aristotelian speculative science, i.e., whether it is demonstrative in the sense of being a knowledge-producing activity ordained by a single subject whose principles are universal and  necessary.[12]  Concerns of this sort clearly underlie Boethius of Dacia's appraisal of traditional grammar: