Dalgarno and Leibniz on the particles

This article discusses the treatment of linguistic particles in various contexts by seventeenth-century philosophers, linguists and logicians. Starting out with a discussion of the logical tradition which formed the background to many of these treatments, the article then focuses on the approach to the subject taken by George Dalgarno, author of the first artificial language published in the seventeenth century, and on Leibniz's study of particles in the context of his grand rational grammar project. The article argues that in spite of a shared background, Dalgarno's and Leibniz's work in this area was informed by widely different aims.