ABSTRACT
The autonomy of linguistics was the catchword launched and propagated by Antoine Meillet at the First Congress of Linguists and, the concluding report of its secretary, the noted Dutch linguist J. Schrijnen, with reference to Meillets standpoint, viewed the entire historic assembly as a solemn act of emancipation: It was a tentative trial linguistics pleaded its own cause in full daylight and before a universal assembly. Recently the interdisciplinary rally of the law-seeking sciences of man whether labelled social sciences or humanities has been brought forward by the Panel of Consultants drawn together by the Department of Social Sciences at UNESCO in connection with the preparation of the present volume on the new trends of research in the social and human sciences. The spontaneous and many-sided interest manifested by the Tenth International Congress of Linguists for the links between the science of language and the various adjacent disciplines is likewise significant.
