ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts a history of how the reflexivity of language has been construed by philosophers and linguists through a selection of significant intellectual stations of importance to the argument of the book. The presentation will not take the form of a comprehensive account of the history of ideas entertained from antiquity to modern times within grammar or the philosophy of language. Rather, the point is to try to come to an understanding of the concepts people have employed in order to think about and theorize language about language, to see the ways in which these concepts have been derived from views about language, and how they have been turned back on those views.
