 Peter’s treatise on syncategorematic words forms part of a separate genre that developed from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The term syncategorema comes from a famous passage of Priscian in his Institutiones grammatice II , 15, in which a distinction is made between two types of wordclasses (partes orationis) distinguished by logicians, viz. nouns and verbs on the one hand, and syncategoremata, or consignificantia, on the other. The latter are defined as words that do not have a definitive meaning on their own, but acquire one only in combination with other, categorematic words. 