MATTHEW LAUZON. French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication, 1648-1789.

Abstract

During the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in the linguistic theorizing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Texts such as Jaap Maat’s Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz (Oxford, 2004), Susan Manly’s Language, Custom, and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth (Aldershot, 2007), Rhodri Lewis’s Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge, 2007) and Marcus Tomalin’s Romanticism and Linguistic Theory: William Hazlitt, Language, and Literature (London, 2009) have brought into greater prominence numerous topics, which merit further exploration. In many respects, Lauzon’s monograph is a worthy contribution to this ongoing critical (re)appraisal since it considers a range of Early Modern and Enlightenment speculations about animal communication, the indigenous languages of North America and the perceived linguistic and national differences that were believed to distinguish French and English. Crucially, Lauzon explicitly disassociates his work from the recent academic preoccupation with seventeenth-century language-planners. While acknowledging the importance of this abiding concern, he stresses that ‘not all early modern thinkers idealized clarity to the exclusion of other communicational virtues’ (p. 5). Consequently, each chapter of his monograph sheds light on several linguistic theories which proffered models of communication that were connected to idealizations of specific forms of community and sociability. Given the forbidding diversity of the extant writings about language and linguistic theory from this period, the neglected sub-domain Lauzon identifies certainly deserves vigilant probing.