La Gramaticografía Del Siglo xviii, entre Tradición y Reorientación

With the transition from the so-called ‘Golden Ages’ to the age of Enlightenment, Spain lost its political and cultural hegemony to its northern neighbour, France. In the field of the language studies, this change is evident especially in the area of lexicography: the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (1726–1739) was soon modeled after the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694). In grammaticography, things seem to have been different, at least if one listens to those few historians of linguistics who payed attention to 18th-century Spanish linguistics. The overall judgements range from ‘a total lack of good grammar’ to a ‘complete disregard of modern [i.e., French] theories’. However, a closer look at the grammatical production of the time does not confirm any of these assessments. Apart from Latin grammars in the tradition of Nebrija and bilingual Spanish-French grammars clearly influenced by contemporary French theories, there are a tradition of monolingual grammaticography, which are totally up-to-date on contemporary European grammatical discussions, focussed, as they were, on the teachings of Port-Royal. The Gramática de la lengua castellana of the Spanish Royal Academy follows along the same lines by developing even more the logical approach to grammatical description. Before starting to write down the final version of their grammar, the Academicians even went as far as to study dozens of grammars of other languages, old and new, Western as well as non-Western, in order to get a more general linguistic framework and to follow more closely the theories of the scholar who, in the eyes of the grammarians of Port-Royal, was the starting point of ‘modern’ linguistics, the Spaniard Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas (1523–1600/1601).