ABSTRACT
In 1896, shortly before Bréal published his Essai, Victor Henry had written a pamplet entitled Antinomies linguistiques, where he tried to unravel the mysteries of languagechange. This treatise, like Bréal’s Essai (cf. Bréal’s reference to Henry, ES: 5, n. 1), was directed against organismic interpretations of language-change, such as those proposed by Schleicher. But it was also written against Bréal’s conception of language-change, its assumptions, rather than its conclusions. Henry realized that Bréal had swung too much to the opposite extreme when he proclaimed that language-change has to be explained by reference to conscious, voluntary action. But although Henry wants to introduce the unconscious into linguistics, he is totally on Bréal’s side in so far as his concern with the speaking subject is concerned. Ten years before the publication of the Antinomies, Henry had reviewed the second edition of Hermann Paul’s Principien (1886), in which he expressed his enthusiasm for this book, a book that finally put an end to organismic speculations and, like Bréal in France, gave pride of place to the speaking subject. Paul destroys
the belief in the real existence of the language, the word, the syllable, the phoneme, and finally the oversight of the fundamental principle which dominates the whole science: there is only one objective reality in language, the speaking subject at the moment he speaks, and a discontinuous series of variable phenomena, the sounds that escape his mouth, at the precise moment when they escape it.
