Ricerc@Sapienza

The notion of field has been very productive in twentieth-century language theory in its various forms and varieties: it is an important epistemological notion, originally developed in physics, in the psychology of perception and in Gestalt psychology, and later introduced in language theories. In this transition, an important step was the notion of field elaborated by Bühler, in his studies on perception and Gestalt, as well as on animal languages, along the lines of the ones also carried out by Köhler.

Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen is rarely mentioned in the historical research on deixis, although this is a central topic of the first book dedicated to language. Following Humboldt, who regarded the class of personal pronouns as exceedingly important for the clarification of the history of human Geist, and dealing with the subsequent developments of this reflection, especially by Brugmann, Cassirer uses the theory of deixis in order to rethink from a phenomenological point of view the Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, with special reference to his theory of schematism.

Introduzione e curatela di un numero monografico dedicato: "Field theories. Psychology, linguistics, biology"(ed. by Marina De Palo).

An important development of the notion of “field” in linguistics is found in Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie (1934), and in particular in his theory of the two fields (symbolical and deictical), through which he provides a perceptual, pragmatic and social anchoring of language. In Bühler’s work, situation and context jointly determine the material space for the play of linguistic forms (Spielraum). The idea of action is the key to his notion of “field”.