Abstract
Pierre Swiggers : Buffier's grammar and language theory. In 1709 Father Claude Buffier (1661-1737) published his Grammaire françoise sur un plan nouveau, which replaced Chiflet's (1659) in the Jesuit curriculum. Buffier's grammar, explicitly based on current French usage, was an attempt to lay down the principles of the French language, not by an appeal to abstract logical categories, but by a careful analysis and classification of observed grammatical structures. Central notions are : nom (the thematic subject), verbe (the predicate), modificatif (adverb, preposition or conjunction) and terme de supplément (imperative, interjection, interrogative or other elliptical expressions). Buffier's syntactical analyses are remarkable and original, not only because they show the variety of functions fulfilled by each part of speech, but also because they point to the specificity of each language, thus preparing the way for language typologies.
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