One topic that commonly finds a place in discussions of the status of linguistics as a science (or has done until recently) is its ‘autonomy’, its independence of other disciplines. Linguists have tended to be somewhat insistent on the need for autonomy because they have felt that in the past the study of language was usually subservient to (and distorted by) the standards of other studies such as logic, philosophy and literary criticism. For this reason the editors of Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (the publication of which is often taken to mark the beginning of ‘modern linguistics’) added to the text of the master its programmatic concluding sentence, to the effect that linguistics should study language ‘for its own sake’ or ‘as an end in itself’