LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: INTRODUCTION By SYLVIA ADAMSON and WENDY AYRES-BENNETT University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge The debate about the relationship between linguistics and philology is long-standing and well documented (e.g. Koerner 1982; Morpurgo Davies 1998). Discussion as to whether the two disciplines are opposed or complementary has intensified periodically over the past two hundred years, notably when linguistics has sought to assert its autonomous or ‘scientific’ nature. For instance, whilst Michel Bre´al (1878) in a published letter to one of the editors of the journal Revue de philologie, de litte´rature et d’histoire anciennes (‘Review of Ancient Philology, Literature and History’), entitled ‘Sur les rapports de la linguistique et de la philologie’ (‘On the relationship between linguistics and philology’), maintained that the closer integration of the two disciplines could only be mutually beneficial (Desmet & Swiggers 1995: 250), Leonard Bloomfield in Language (1933: 512) – the seminal text of American structuralism – asserted that they have little in common. As has been frequently noted, the terms philology and linguistics themselves and their definition are not unproblematic, referring over time to different disciplines and institutional structures and having changing theoretical underpinnings. There are also national differences, notably in the conception of philology (the etymological meaning of which is ‘love of words’). Whereas in the French and German traditions the focus of philology (philologie ⁄ Philologie) has typically been the interpretation and editing of predominantly literary texts, in English emphasis has been placed rather on the study of language in written historical sources, thereby aligning it more closely with historical linguistics. According to Koerner (1982: 406), the first generation of scholars working in the nascent discipline of historical or comparative grammar in the first decades of the nineteenth century – Bopp, Rask, Grimm – still regarded themselves as philologists, even though they were fully aware of the originality of their endeavours compared with their more literary-oriented predecessors. One of the earliest attempts to distinguish explicitly the two domains is found in August Schleicher’s Die Sprachen Europas in Systematischer U ¨ bersicht (1850) (‘The Languages of Europe Viewed Systematically’; Schleicher 1983). On the very first page Schleicher writes: Die Wissenschaft na¨mlich, welche zwar zuna¨chst die Sprache zum Object hat, dieselbe aber doch vorzugsweise nur als Mittel betrachtet um durch sie in das geistige Wesen und Leben eines oder mehrerer Volkssta¨mme einzudringen ist die Philologie und sie geho¨rt wesentlich derGeschichte an. Ihr gegenu¨ ber steht die Linguistik, diese hat die Sprache als solche zum Object und sie hat direct mit dem geschichtlichen Leben der die Sprachen redenden Vo¨lker Nichts zu schaffen, sie bildet einen Theil der Naturgeschichte des Menschen. [The discipline which has language as its object, but which considers this only as a way of gaining access to the spiritual nature and life of one or more language families is philology and this belongs essentially to history. In contrast there is linguistics, which has language per se as its object and which has nothing to do with the historical life of the people who speak the languages; it forms part of the natural history of man.] Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 109:3 (2011) 201–206 Ó The authors 2011. Transactions of the Philological Society Ó The Philological Society 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.