Language and Grammar: Diderot and the Discourse of Encyclopedism

Abstract

TO READ is to bring into play, with varying degrees of awareness, a theory of language. Our belief in the meaning of a particular text follows from our understanding of how words signify and language functions, in the context of both everyday communication and written or literary texts. Conversely, any theory of language implicitly contains guidelines for reading, as can be seen in the use that literary critics have made of the writings of Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste, and other theoreticians of language. The relation between a theory of language and the particular practice of language that is reading, or in a broader sense interpretation, is particularly complex in the case of the eighteenth-century French grammarian-philosophers. Part of this complexity stems from the very reasons why contemporary linguists, with the exception of Chomsky, have dismissed the language theory of the classical age. Only much later in the history of linguistics would the distinction between language and speech, langue and parole, be made rigorous, thereby allowing modern linguistics to be founded as a science. Hence, not only do the grammarian-philosophers appear entangled in questions of linguistic diachrony and usage, their concern with a concept of mind taken over from Cartesian philosophy and Port-Royal grammar seems to qualify their work as rationalist psychology rather than as a truly scientific study of language. A certain Grammont has claimed unhesitatingly that tout ce qui est anterieur au XJXe siecle, n'etant pas encore la linguistique, peut etre expedie en quelques lignes.'I Such a claim not-