According to Priscian, delenda is a participle because it agrees in number, case, and gender with a noun, namely Carthago, the subject. In Priscian's theory of POS, words are classified according to the inflectional paradigms that are created independent of the grammatical context the word is in. A misapplication of Priscian's verb categories for the modern notion of non-finite clause might thus result on the recognition of clauses where there are none.