| The historiography of linguistics is a newly emerging discipline which not only deals with the synchronic study of past ages but also with the evolution of the linguistic matrix. One of the goals of linguistic historiography is to discover what makes the study of language scientific. The present study, then, addresses itself to this problem by comparing eighteenth century theories of language with those of the twentieth. Historiographers of linguistics have, for the most part, labelled prenineteenth-century language studies as prescientific by demonstrating that many of the concerns of the historical and comparative linguists of the nineteenth century were in an embryonic stage in the grammaires generales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is, moreover, an affinity between eighteenth and twentieth-century theories of language, both philosophically and methodologically speaking. This comparison will therefore reveal the differences that emerge from a prescientific and a postscientific treatment of similar problems with similar methodologies.;This study is organized according to those categories identified as being part of a theory of language that is independent of the scientific experience of language-as-an-object. These categories include the notions of space, time and the self. The history of linguistics reveals that for the past three hundred years the problems of the origin of language and the function of language have figured either implicitly or explicitly at the basis of every theory of language. These two questions of language origin and of language function, which can be considered philosophical constants of language theory, cannot be adequately answered without reference to the self, making it ultimately impossible for the linguist to completely separate the thinking subject from the object which is language. It is suggested, then, that further progress in linguistics may depend on a conception of the self that incorporates answers to the questions of language origin and language function.;The Grammaire generale et raisonnee of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, first published in 1660, is the logical starting point of this study because it marks the discernible moment when language study came out from behind the prescriptive grid of Latin pedagogy to eventually become an autonomous science in the nineteenth century. What distinguishes the scientific study of language that began in the nineteenth century from the preceding centuries' language studies was the nineteenth century's objectivization of language. Thinking linguistically means considering language as an independent object of study, and this was not a trait of the general grammars. Linguistics as an objective science, however, has it limitations, for the latest developments in the discipline have pointed to the conclusion that the object, language, can never be totally divorced from the speaking subject, if one truly wants to understand the nature of language. |
