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In discussing the broad historical context of Saussure's peculiarly explicit formulation of an autonomous science of language, I placed considerable emphasis upon the extensive philological tradition to which this science belongs. While Saussure's formulation of the object of linguistics as the language system is most normally, and quite accurately, examined in the more modern terms of its dependence upon the neo-Kantian conception of scientific methodology which to varying degrees pervaded all the social sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, the wider context and the history of linguistic study deserve recollection.² In common with the entire spectrum of medieval European humanistic scholarship, it is the rediscovery and reception of the works of the classics of Hellenic and Roman civilisation within the confines of the monastery and of the university which originally demarcated and defined the scholarly disciplines.³ If philology was the methodology of such recovery and transmission in general, and exegesis of the written monument or of the petrified written form was the characteristic mode of dissemination, then it is not hard to see that the later developments of an objective grammar or of language studied as a code are broadly consistent, if secularised, representations of earlier textual traditions. Thus if Indo-European linguistics could take the classical languages as their fully formed and autonomous object of investigation, the more modern project of a scientific linguistics merely extends the philological methodology to the concept of grammatical structure, and further rationalises and universalises the normative consistency of the classical texts into a set of rules that are now to be taken as the laws governing language as such.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-11283-8_3

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