ABSTRACT
By the end of the nineteenth century, western language science had long stimulated and been stimulated by reflection on second language learning. That reflection did not comprise a unified tradition, or an explicit ‘theory’ in the modern sense. Rather, it consisted of diverse perceptions, assertions and speculations by (among others) Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Roger Bacon, Benedetto Varchi and Nicholas Beauzée. In addition, several waves of interest in the idea that languages share common properties despite their evident differences had propagated through western language science. Two of the most ambitious conceptualizations of universal grammar were those of the speculative grammarians and the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century general grammarians. The record of inquiry into universal grammar also includes less elaborated, sometimes indirect, contributions from such varied scholars as Plato, Varro, Humboldt and others. Writers and thinkers who ignored or rejected universal grammar are also part of its history so that, in different ways, ancient Greek monolingualism, the Renaissance focus on particular grammars, and the works of Tooke and Steinthal contribute to the history of universal grammar. Experiences of L2 learning have sometimes inspired conceptualization of universal grammar, and notions of universal grammar have inspired conceptualization of L2 learning. All of this is hidden to contemporary scholarship that accepts that everything that is worth knowing about L2 acquisition has been discovered since the 1960s or 1970s, and moreover, that the relevance of universal grammar to L2 acquisition is an exclusively modern insight.
