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This paper investigates the birth and growth of the traditional eight syntactic categories in the history linguistics. It then examines how such syntactic categories have been treated in generative grammar. The traditional system appears to be established as follows: Aristotle added syndesmos (conjunction) to Plato's onoma (noun)-rhema (verb) system; the Stoics recognized mesotes (adverb) as a new category and subdivided syndesmos into syndesmos (conjunction) and arthron (article), later replaced with interjections by Latin grammarians, and onoma into onoma (common noun) and prosegoria (proper noun); Alexandrian grammarians established the traditional system by reuniting two kinds of nouns into one and adopting more categories such as prothesis (preposition), antonymia (pronoun), and metoche (participles), later recognized as adjectives. In generative grammar, major categories are considered to be composites of features [±N] and [±V] and this view makes it possible to capture the similarities across categories. It is shown that some traditional subordinate conjunctions are reanalyzed as prepositions and complementizers, and Inflection/Tense, the light verb v, and Determiner are treated as new syntactic categories and claimed to assume important roles in minimalist syntactic operations.