The Theory of Language

Abstract

Various sources inform Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Language’, as he calls his broad reflection on the condition of language in an early note. Because he is engaged in an investigation of current ways of thinking about it, quite a lot of his material reflects his reading. From Berkeley’s Neoplatonic ‘language of nature’ he took a lasting sense of language as a transcendental code. More significant for his development of a modern idea of language are the notions of empiricists working in the native grain. John Locke on words and ideas, David Hartley on the association of ideas, and Horne Tooke on etymology provide him with material notions of linguistic process, however limited from a modern point of view. While in Germany he was introduced to philology and hermeneutics; at Göttingen he was exposed to some of the newer thinking about the language of Scripture as well as to early Germanic dialects. On his return to England in 1799, he pursued the idea of language on all fronts.KeywordsModern LanguageArbitrary SignSymbolic ProcessGood WriterModern PointThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.