Eugenio Coseriu

Past, Present and Future

Klaas Willems, Cristinel Munteanu, Klaas Willems, Cristinel Munteanu

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110712414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

The volume is published on the occasion of the birth centennial of Eugenio Coseriu (1921–2002). It is the first collective volume to appear in English in which various scholars present a variety of perspectives on Coseriu's scholarly work and discuss its continuing relevance for the language sciences. Coseriu's international reputation has suffered from his commitment to publish in languages such as Spanish, German, French, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, to the detriment of English. As a consequence, his work is less well-known outside Romance and German linguistics. The volume aims to raise the general awareness of Coseriu's work among linguists around the world, in accordance with Coseriu's own adage that it takes a constructive mindset (acknowledging "accomplishments and limitations") to do justice to all scholarly work in the humanities. The articles are organized into three major thematic clusters: 1) philosophy of language, 2) history of the language sciences and 3) theory and practice of "Integral Linguistics". The volume is essential reading for anyone working in these fields and for those seeking to gain deeper understanding of Coseriu's goal to develop a unitary approach to language which takes as its point of departure the "activity of speaking".

Part I: Philosophy of language

The essence of language: on Coseriu’s philosophy of language

Jürgen Trabant

Language manifests itself only in the speaking of individuals, and speaking is always speaking a particular language. The whole being of language necessarily revolves within this circle.

For Humboldt, language is the first form of formativity or creativity of the human being. The human being is characterised by formativity, and at the same time formativity is both the characteristic feature and task of the human being. […] To create language means to manifest contents of consciousness semiotically for the Other, i. e. to project them into the world. In this regard, language is form, and since language is activity, it is formativity. Language forms the contents and also manifests their material expression. It posits the contents in the world between I and Thou. […] To create language means to create a specific language each time. […] The particular language corresponds to the idea of language in a historical form, to its essential historicity.^*

1 Introduction

The first quote, from 1958, contains Coseriu’s philosophy of language in a nutshell. And the second quote, which summarises Humboldt’s philosophy in Coseriu’s monumental (and partially) posthumous Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie [History of the Philosophy of Language] (2015), is like an expansion of that sentence.¹ According to Coseriu, philosophy is concerned with the question of the “sense of the being of objects”, “der Sinn ihres Seins” (2015 I: 7); hence, the philosophy of language investigates the “essence of language as such”, “das Wesen der Sprache an sich” (2015, I: 13). Coseriu’s work is a disclosure of his reflections on the “essence of language”.

There is no other linguist in the twentieth century who was as much a philosopher of language as Eugenio Coseriu was. However, Coseriu did not write a systematic book on the philosophy of language. He wrote important philosophical papers (e. g. Coseriu 1971 [1966] and 1971 [1967]), he also lectured on the history of language philosophy, first in 1968/69 and 1970/71, and then, fifteen years later, in the winter semesters 1985/86, 1987/88 and 1988/89. These lectures were published as books: the first part in the 1970s, re-edited in 2003 (and again in 2015), and the second part in 2015, edited by Jörn Albrecht. As a “continental” scholar, deeply formed by Hegelian thought, Coseriu distinguishes the systematic and the historical perspectives (cf. 2015, II: 320), but he does not separate systematic considerations from their historical presentation. History is the unfolding of the “idea” of language, hence of his idea of language, too. And Coseriu is not only a philosopher when he speaks and writes explicitly on the philosophy of language, he is also a philosopher in his linguistic work. Or rather: his philosophical observations also aim at an epistemological foundation of linguistics. His philosophy of language is thus also a philosophy of linguistics. The development of his linguistics mirrors the most important features of his reflections in the philosophy of language. My presentation will therefore start with Coseriu’s linguistics and highlight its philosophical foundations.

2 The philosophical principles of Coseriu’s linguistics

Two of Coseriu’s early books are commentaries on Saussure or rather on Saussurean concepts in modern linguistics. The title of the first book, Sincronía, diacronía e historia. El problema del cambio lingüístico [Synchrony, diachrony and history. The problem of linguistic change] (1978 [1958]), refers to Saussure’s famous dichotomy between diachrony and synchrony, and the third term in the title, “history”, shows the solution to the problem posed by that opposition: diachrony and synchrony do not form two different kinds of linguistics (and linguistic change is not just within the purview of diachrony), but they are two aspects of history, the dimension in which language exists. “History” is not the passing of time – as the Saussurean term “diachrony” derived from the Greek word for time, chronos, implies – but “history” is the world of human action, mondo civile in Vichian terms, that part of the world that is created by humans, as opposed to nature. Language is human action and hence essentially – wesentlich in German – “historical”. It manifests itself in the activities of individuals in interaction with others. Therefore it is “ser con otro que coincide con el ser histórico del hombre”, “being with the Other that coincides with the historical being of Man” (1978 [1958]: 70, italics in the original). Language changes all the time because it is created by human individuals in dialogue. “Cambio linguistico”, linguistic change, simply belongs to its essential historicity. “The history of language overcomes the antinomy between synchrony and diachrony”, “la historia de la lengua supera la antinomía entre sincronía y diacronía” (1978 [1958]: 281). The verb superar is used in the sense of Hegel’s aufheben.

The same dialectical argumentative pattern underlies some of the five studies, “cinco estudios”, in Coseriu’s most famous book Teoría del lenguaje y lingüística general. Cinco estudios [Theory of language and general linguistics. Five studies] (1973 [1962]). The title, here again, refers to Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, while adding the “theory of language” (which is not the same as “general linguistics”, cf. Coseriu 2015, I: 12 – 13). The first chapter of the volume, “Sistema, norma y habla” [System, norm and speech] alludes to the Saussurean opposition of langue and parole and argues that langue and parole are not opposed as they are in the Cours but belong together in the triad of system, norm and speech. The title of the study leads to the most profound opposition between Coserian and Saussurean linguistics, to the primacy of speaking: speaking – hablar – is the reality of language, the way in which language is in the world, whereas norm and system are layers of the rules underlying the production of speech. The activity of speaking, is the essence of language. Activity is enérgeia in the sense of Aristotle and Humboldt. In this perspective, the final – itself apocryphal – phrase of the Cours, that linguistics is about “la langue envisagée en elle-même et pour elle-même” (Saussure 1975 [1916]: 317), is a fatal postulate for linguistics. According to Coseriu, linguistics has to be “lingüística del hablar”, linguistics of speaking, as it appears in the subtitle of the fifth chapter: “Determinación y entorno. Dos problemas de una lingüística del hablar” [Determination and environment. Two problems of a linguistics of speaking]. And this chapter shows also that hablar transcends language since linguistic activity is embedded in the human being and in the world – the “surroundings”, entornos – to which it is related in many ways. As Coseriu always said, we do not speak with language alone.

The second chapter of Coseriu (1973 [1962]), “Forma y substancia en los sonidos del lenguaje” [Form and substance in the sounds of language], takes up another aspect of the langue-parole dichotomy (which of course is much older than the Cours) and argues against the concept of langue as a domain of pure form in linguistics as it was promoted by glossematics. Louis Hjelmslev radicalised Saussure’s sentence that langue is a form not a substance, “la langue est une forme et non une substance” (Saussure 1975 [1916]: 169, 157). Coseriu shows that the forms of sounds are always “substantial” forms, i. e. linguistically formed matter, that there can be no pure forms in language that is concrete and living action.

Finally, the fourth chapter of Coseriu (1973 [1962]), “Logicismo y antilogicismo en la gramática” [Logicism and anti-logicism in grammar], directs us towards another essential feature of language and the underlying philosophy of language: language is not a form of logical thought, nor is it illogical thought or feeling, but it is a creative human activity in its own right because its specific task is to form concepts that precede logical categories. It is “das bildende Organ des Gedanken”, “the formative organ of thought” (Humboldt 1903 – 1936, VII: 53). However, that “thought” is specifically linguistic, a special form of cognition: Bedeutung. And since that formation of content coincides with its historicity, it is subject to inherent change and diversity. Language (including Bedeutung) is always created in the form of particular languages. The linguistic creation of thought will be Coseriu’s most important field as a linguist: semantics is the centre of his descriptive work.

Thus, the aforementioned publications do not only treat subjects of linguistic theory but also – and not only implicitly – the most important questions of Coseriu’s philosophy of language cited in the introductory quote: activity, formativity, semanticity, alterity (‘I – Thou’) and historicity. Their titles often reflect Coseriu’s forma mentis: Coseriu’s thought is triadic, not dyadic, and these triads are inspired by Hegel. The opposition of diachrony and synchrony is aufgehoben, i. e. mediated and overcome, in history (the two verbs Coseriu uses in his Spanish publications for Hegel’s aufheben are superar and levantar, cf. Coseriu 1978 [1958]: 272). Language and speech are not opposed to each other: the activity of hablar encompasses both, the concrete appearance of language in the world as well as the rules underlying that activity which creates formed substances. And the very task of the activity of hablar is the creation of meaning, Bedeutung, which is neither “pure thought” nor a dark, irrational entity.

These remarks on his first linguistic publications are also meant to highlight the fact that Coseriu’s appearance in the world of modern linguistics in the 1950s was something special. He was modern, contributing to new developments in linguistics, but at the same time he was critical of those developments, and that criticism was based on firm philosophical convictions about language and speech, or let us rather say about the “essence” (Wesen) of language and speech. The permanent presence of his reflections on the “essence of language”, the quest for “the essence of language as such”, “das Wesen der Sprache an sich” (2015, I: 13), is the very specificity of Coseriu’s linguistics and also the motive for its development. Thus, not only does the production of thought (Bedeutung), as the very essence of linguistic activity, necessarily lead Coseriu to semantics, but the philosophical primacy of hablar also drives him to produce his most radical linguistic book: Textlinguistik [Text linguistics] (Coseriu 2007 [1980]). Hablar does not only constitute the material for the investigation of its underlying rules (langue), but the primacy of hablar also allows linguistics to deal with the concrete utterances themselves, the level of individual speech, in a linguistics of texts. Text linguistics for Coseriu is not only the study of transphrastic phenomena and extralinguistic things beyond the utterances (entornos) but also – and mainly – the study of individual utterances themselves, which necessarily involves an interpretation of these texts. Coseriu’s Textlinguistik can therefore be considered the outcome of his philosophical insight that language is hablar, activity or “formativity” as he calls it in the first sentence of my introductory quote, thereby using the central term of one of his important philosophical inspirations, the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson (cf. Pare...