‘Language turned back on itself’

Thanks to the vicissitudes of history (the Norman Conquest 1066) it is possible to trace the emergence of the English metalanguage in an unbroken tradition from its beginnings in the late fourteenth century down to the present day, under (almost) laboratory conditions. Concentrating on core areas of the grammar, this paper outlines the growth of the English metalanguage, and the internal and external forces which helped to shape it. Briefly, the terms of linguistic description were absorbed into a wider, centuries-old tradition of universal grammar in which many of the categories of general or theoretical linguistics survive today. These provide the materials on which the creators of syllabuses and writers of textbooks draw in their work.