Sensible Words: Linguistic Theory in Late Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Sensible Words: Linguistic Theory in Late Seventeenth-Century England MURRAY COHEN It is a truth critically acknowledged that every literary work is “about language.” What this has come to mean is that words themselves are the literary essence, that form is meaningful and style is character. But when Restoration and eighteenth-century authors write about language, they are as interested in elementary linguistic features as they are in such literary qualities as form and style. When Dryden promotes an English language which has a “certain measure” or when he recommends rhyme, first, for the “help it brings to the memory” and, second, for its ability to “bound and circumscribe the fancy . . . and bring forth the richest and clearest thoughts,”1 he is claiming that literary language must be systematic and that its system determines how and what the mind thinks. When, in A Tale of a Tub, Peter obeys the letter of his father’s will by picking at its actual letters or when Walter Shandy “mends” Erasmus by using his penknife to “mar” a letter, what is being satirized is the submission of otherwise uncon­ strained will to the physical elements, the literally visible parts, of written authority. When Pope’s Belinda confuses her public and her pubic hairs, because she exaggerates a metaphoric analogy into 229 230 / MURRAY COHEN a necessary identity, then the reader is alerted to what linguistic events—like metaphor, rhyme, punning—do to the mind. Restora­ tion and eighteenth-century literature abounds in such linguisticbased events—in personified tautology, dialect, convention, and allusion; in language projects and epistles—yet the obvious sources of this literary interest in linguistics, the linguistic texts of the period, have neither been adequately collected nor interpreted in a literary context. If Restoration and eighteenth-century literature is, in important ways, “about linguistics,” then we need to know the kinds and assumptions of contemporary linguistic texts. In this paper, I survey the types and trends of linguistic work in the second half of the seventeenth century and give special emphasis to the most popular and familiar of those texts, that is, to books for the grammar schools. Some of the texts have been cited in surveys by both historical linguists interested in grammatical categories, pronunciation, rhetoric, or universal languages, and intellectual historians arguing for a dominant and controlling principle—anti-Ciceronianism, scientific method, or utilitarianism.2 Although we are likely to be more familiar with the historians of ideas since they, like most of us, are “literary” types, I want to emphasize that both groups tend to be equally, though differently, provincial in their studies. The historical linguists too often accept categories which aren’t real. They write “whole” books on a part of a system, and such vertical views of history inevitably sacrifice writers and their works to progressive principles. For example, Ian Michael’s important work, English Grammatical Categories, does not get close enough to the texts he studies because of his self-imposed method of organizing his material. He dismisses the inconsistencies within individual grammars by choosing “to follow one consistent practice [that is, his own descriptive outline] rather than to attempt in each case a judgment about the author’s intentions” (202). Michael claims that English grammarians, unlike their French counterparts, were not deeply interested in the philosophy of language. In fact, their essential interests were the theological origins and theoretical Sensible Words I 231 implications of their proposals, and the inconsistencies within their systems indicate the complexity of the issues they accepted as relevant to grammar. The place of linguistic texts in the works of the intellectual historians is equally narrow. In the works of Croll, Williamson, Jones, and Adolph, linguistic texts are used as sources of evidence supporting grander theoretical constructs. Such a method tends to turn particular writers into witnesses and deprives them of a coherent identity independent of the particular trial being conducted. Once we elevate “minor” texts from foot­ notes and lists, we see that much of what is important in each linguistic text emerges from looking at the sequence of its argu­ ment and its printed presentation. If we avoid the methodological constraints of intellectual his­ tory and historical linguistics...