It is understandable why analyses of this kind should have remained in suspense as long as discourse remained the object of grammar; as soon as a stratum of articulation was reached where representative values crumbled away, there was a movement from the other side of grammar, where grammar no longer had any power, into thedomain of usage and history syntax, in the eighteenth century, was thought of as the locus of the arbitrary in which the habits of each people were deployed according to whim.