ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the three arcs of development in American linguistics begin to separate in a way that has come to look to us today as somehow "natural," that is, as somehow reflecting naturally occurring fault lines within the subject matter itself, within language. However, if we retrace the paths of separation of the three arcs, we discover that there is nothing "natural" about existing intradisciplinary boundary lines. Rather we discover that the boundary lines are, in large measure, the products of the late-nineteenth-century institutionalization of language studies that came in Whitney's wake.
