The treatment of syntax by some early 19th-century linguists

This article examines the views about syntax held by Humboldt, on the one hand, and by the founders of historical-comparative grammar (Bopp, Rask, Grimm, Pott, Schleicher), on the other. In general, it is noted that the grammaire générale tradition of 17th and 18th centuries still survives in the work of such scholars, despite of all criticism they seemingly raised against it. For Humboldt, the common core of all languages has its source in the identity of human thought; also his treatment of the verb and especially his reference to a ‘natural’ word order (i.e., SVO) are clearly reminiscent of this tradition. Traces thereof are also found in Bopp’s analysis of Indo-European conjugation, and in some of Rask’s writings. For instance, Rask, just as Humboldt, assumes a ‘natural’ word order and proposes a list of possible syntactic forms which closely remind us of Girard’s membres de phrase. Grimm’s position appears as more innovative, heavily influenced by a Romantic view of language, but some older conceptions sometimes show up in his work, e.g., when he deals with the notion of ‘subject’. Pott does not completely reject general grammar and a logically-based view of language; he only stresses the need of a more empirical approach than that adopted by the 17th and 18th century linguists. This picture radically changed with Steinthai and Schleicher: the former scholar pronounced a ‘divorce’ between grammar and logic, while the latter one argued that syntax does not belong to linguistics proper and rejected any possibility of postulating syntactic distinctions which do not have any direct morphological correlate.