Building linguistics as a multidisciplinary discipline

Abstract

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the abandonment of philology in favour of linguistics, a new discipline in terms of both its objectives and its methods, was already well underway. In this work of disciplinary and scientific development, linguistics was immediately conceived as a multidisciplinary science, the only one capable of dealing with the complexity of human language. Several great linguists of the time insisted on the fact that linguistics touches on several sciences at once and that it must know how to integrate them all. We rely on two articles by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), published in 1904 in the famous encyclopaedia Brokgauz and Efron, to take the measure of a multidisciplinary injunction that remains as relevant as ever.