Linguistic idealism in Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s <em>Del lenguaje en general</em> (1939)

Abstract

In 1939 Menéndez Pidal wrote «Del lenguaje en general» as the introduction to his work Historia de la Lengua española. In this text, he increased the terminology coming from Vossler’s linguistic idealism in relation to other earlier and later publications. This was not, however, an essential change in Pidal’s theoretical foundations, already established since Orígenes del español (1926), but an attempt to modernize his traditionalist theory using the terms of idealism, which was triumphant among his disciples.