 Historical-philological semantics incorporated elements from all the above classical traditions and dominated the linguistic scene roughly from 1870 to 1930, with the work of scholars such as Michel Bréal, Hermann Paul, and Arsène Darmesteter (Gordon 1982). In particular, it absorbed from speculative etymology an interest in the conceptual mechanisms underlying the formation of word meaning, it acquired from rhetorical analysis a taxonomic toolkit for the classification of lexical phenomena, and it assimilated from lexicography and textual philology the empirical basis of descriptive data that subsequent theories of word meaning would have to account for (Geeraerts 2013).