A growing interest in both the history and the historiography of linguistics has in recent times been seen by many as an indication of the discipline's increasing maturity, despite the fact that in the opening sentence of his recent book (1998), Seuren laments the still insufficient volume of scholarship in this area. There was a boom in the publishing of histories of linguistics in the 1960s and early 1970s: the beginnings of a critical historiography were established, and journals and professional associations were founded. The 1990s saw a new wave of activity: apart from a plethora of edited volumes, several histories appeared and to the now established journals (Historiographia Linguistica, Histoire-Epistémologie-Langage) has been added another (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, started in 1991). Among the histories are one-volume publications by Koerner and Asher (eds.) (1995), Malmberg (1991), Swiggers (1997) and Seuren (1998), as well as multi-volume editions: Lepschy (ed.) which appeared first in Italian (vol.1 in 1990), then in English (vol. 1 in 1994), Auroux, vol.1 in 1989, and Schmitter (1987), which is the first of a planned eight-volume series in German. A trilingual volume is scheduled to start appearing (Koerner, Auroux, Niederehe and Versteegh (eds.), in preparation). In all this, there have been many ‘persistent questions’ (to use a phrase from Koerner, 1995), but there have also been some shifts of emphasis. Unavoidably selective, this article will attempt to survey more recent work, referring back to older work for certain key points only (for earlier work, see Koerner, 1978b; Ayres-Bennett, 1987; Swiggers, 1987). As certain questions tend to recur, concerning, for example, the chronological versus the thematic, the descriptive versus the theoretical, or breadth versus depth of coverage, I shall try to characterise briefly a number of recent approaches, before examining certain key issues in greater detail. Finally, I shall look at two examples from the founding period of contemporary linguistics in France.
