La notion grammaticale du sujet au XIXe siècle

JEAN STEFANINI: The Grammatical Notion of Subject in the Nineteenth Century. ; Of the simplified theoretical, rationalist and logical framework of Port-Royal, the assimilation of the grammatical subject and predicate to the logical subject and predicate was to hold sway for a long time. It was put to question oruy in the 18th century during the dispute on the order of words and was dealt its fmal blow by Condillac's «psychology» and its rejection of the notion of substance. Slowly elaborated and inseparable from human progress, language involved man as a whole, body and soul, action and reflection. Emphasis was laid on the unity of the gesture and the cry, of perception-judgment on the analytical role of language. Linguistics was founded on a sensualist and associationist phychology (Herbert) to which Humboldt gave its historical and social dimension and which his disciple Steinthal placed in a framework defmed by individual collective and logical psychology. In this new, psychology-based, general grammar (of which Wundt was the last avatar), psychological subject and predicate play an essential role along with the grammatical subject and predicate and their logical counterparts.