The Ancient Tamil grammatical tradition does not provide in its terminology the means to distinguish between individual words and the larger linguistic entities which the French language can refer to by means of syntagme (english phrase or syntagma) and phrase (english sentence). In practice, however, traditional Tamil grammarians were nevertheless capable of making precise statements concerning elements of Ancient Tamil syntax by making use of terms with a broad linguistic spectrum, such as kil.avi (or col), or by metalinguistically deploying the flexible “citation-verb” enral, or by means of deictic variables and the ceytal verb (“to do”). This article examines in detail a few examples, extracted from the vast traditional Tamil grammatical corpus. In doing so, it puts them in their intellectual context, which could be called “The Indian Metalinguistic Area”, where this literature has coexisted for a very long time with Sanskrit grammatical literature.