ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the discourses of 'theorizing' in some major works in this century attempting to establish the foundations of linguistics. The mentalist descriptive linguistics of continental European structuralism spearheaded by Saussure turned against philology so emphatically that 'traditional grammar', though admittedly 'unscientific', was judged more 'correct' and 'less open to criticism'. Logic played an influential role too in the unsettled relation between linguistics and philosophy. The fortunes of psychology in linguistics also alternated with those of social research. For the early mentalists, 'language' was 'exclusively psychological'. In return, 'society' and 'social' aspects were treated only episodically, chiefly as a regulatory factor that disseminates language and imposes uniformity upon it, and sometimes as a devisive or irrelevant factor, a move repeated by Hjelmslev. Hjelmslev, however, declared the 'main task' of 'linguistics' to be the creation of 'an immanent algebra of language', and his Resume executed such a system in relentless detail.
