The History of the Notion of Word-Formation, the Philosophical Grammars, and the Problem of Time in the 17th and the 18th Centuries

It is commonly assumed that between the 16th and 18th centuries, the field of language sciences comprised three main research domains: works on language origins, practical grammars, and philosophical or rational grammars. However, Alfieri (2023) has shown that between the 13th and 16th centuries, rational grammars encompassed two distinct types of works that differ significantly in their position along the axis of time and their theory of derivation. This hypothesis is further explored in the present work to demonstrate that rational grammars also comprised two different groups of works in the 17th and 18th centuries: ‘proto-synchronic’ grammars that exclude data on word-formation and ‘proto-diachronic’ grammars that extensively describe data on word-formation but interpret these data sub specie originis linguae.