The work elaborates a thought of the Woolfian poetics whose plastic, moving articulation is the sentence, such as the English language designates it by the word "a phrase". The work is thus an essay of poetics that stands out from the biographical, historicizing approaches that dominate in Woolfian criticism. that make it an original work.

This book, which inscribes itself in the field of the history and epistemology of the language sciences, examines how the utterance has come to be regarded as a relevant level of analysis in the course of the history of linguistic theories.