Empiricism and linguistics in eighteenth-century Great Britain

✍ Scribed by Patrice Bergheaud

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 926 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-7411
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00135843

✦ Synopsis

This paper aims at specifying the complex links which two major and polemically related lgth-eentury linguistic theories (James Harris' universal grammar in Hermes (1751) and John Home Tooke's system of etymology in the Diversions of Purley (1786, 1804) bear to empiricism. It describes both the ideologicalethical determining factors of the theories and the epistemologieal consequences dependent upon their respective philosophical orientation (Harris using classical Greek philosophy against empiricism, Tooke criticizing Locke's semantics along Hobbesian lines). The effects within the linguistic theories are examined through a comparison of the theories of determination which follow from divergent theses concerning abstraction. The analysis proposed in this paper exemplifies once more the historical question of the exact location of the compatibility/incompatibility between empiricist and nonempiricist linguistic theories.