In the latter half of the twentieth century, language theory adopted a formalist approach that focused on sentence generation. While generative models were originally intended as computational accounts of sentence grammaticality, they were later taken to reflect an inborn competence and a “language learning device.” Yet formal grammars were being worked out from analyses of script using orthographic units and categories. Several problems arose in bootstrapping grammatical categories in the mind to units like words and phrases, which entailed a shoehorning of concepts of syntax to children's speech. While theory-driven perception research sought to confirm children’s recognition of words, studies of speech corpora indicate that young children are not manipulating units like words as separate units but chunked clusters of items. In documenting these problems, recent evidence is discussed showing that syntactic category information may not be represented as properties of words in the brain, undermining the hypothesis of a language acquisition device.

Jean’s Roman de la Rose is characterised by its intense interest in language, signification, and representation. Several elements of Jean’s linguistic speculation resonate with academic debates among contemporary grammarians and logicians at the University of Paris. The following developments appear to have had a particularly important impact upon Jean’s poem: the rapid rise of modistic grammar in the late 1260s; theories of “improper” expression; debates over the nature and stability of imposition; and the related debate over the problem of “empty reference”. Jean’s reflection on language, metaphor, and reference bears a striking affinity to the theories of signification formulated by intentionalist grammarians, particularly the controversial Roger Bacon. Following Bacon, Jean directly critiques a number of arguments advanced by the first-generation modistae or speculative grammarians, and finally reveals the basic premises of modistic grammar as a whole to be untenable. Elaborating the suggestions of intentionalist grammarians, Jean emphasises the contextual, fluctuating nature of language: signification itself is revealed to be a fundamentally interpretive, inferential process that eludes regulation. I suggest that rather than simply adopting Baconian ideas about language and signification, Jean employs the Rose as a testing ground to explore the extreme consequences and implications of Bacon’s unusual language theory.

Although French was displacing Latin as the international language of choice, print increasingly relied on the vernacular of its intended readers. This allows the translation and transnational dissemination of texts to be mapped more precisely. Printing itself helped to standardise 'national' languages, but authors and translators also learned to gauge their vocabulary and style of writing to suit a wider audience. Theories of language were combined with detailed study of core languages and dialects, leading to a greater awareness of the principles and practices of translation. Dictionaries and other language tools had first emerged in connection with Bible translation, but from the late seventeenth century more imaginative reference works and encyclopedias allowed authors to adopt more sophisticated writing techniques to evade censorship. For historians aware of these processes of international transmission, printed texts of all kinds provide a vast resource not just for content analysis, but also for conceptual history.