Even ‘naive’ speakers use a distinction between actual, realized speech with its ‘literal’ meaning, and an underlying level of ‘what is actually meant’. Such a distinction is made because speakers instinctively feel that very often actual speech does not represent exactly what the speaker intends to say. In this paper it is claimed that this non-technical distinction lies at the basis of a technical distinction between a surface structure of speech and an underlying level. In the technical stage of Arabic grammar the emphasis shifts from an analysis of the underlying intention of the speaker towards an explanation of the syntactic form of actual speech, which is mapped onto an underlying representation. Both in the Classical Greek and the Arabic/Islamic tradition we find a development from an early stage of exegetical activity, in which the intention of the speaker or the text is elaborated by positing an underlying level of semantic representation, towards a technical distinction between a surface level and an underlying level. The difference between the two traditions lies in the fact that Greek linguistics was more semantically oriented, whereas in Arabic grammar the main tool of the grammarians, the taqdîr, was basically an instrument to explain the syntactic structure of speech, in line with the predominantly formal approach of the Arabic grammarians. Compared with modern linguistic theory, both traditions have in common that they do not look for an underlying level of meaning that is universal to all languages. The main reason for this difference is that neither Greek nor Arabic linguists were interested in the study of other languages.