Weisgerber and Trier’s Wortfeldheorie has been considered the first consistent outcome of post-Saussurean semantics as well as the first step towards an “ontological structuralism” (Eco 1984). I will show that the Neo-Humboldtian approach could be seen, instead, as an attempt to read the Saussurean conception of language in the light of the Humboldtian notion of language as energeia.
The last decades have seen an increasing work of reconstruction of the theoretical thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a huge work in which the Italian linguist and philosopher Tullio De Mauro played an important role, leading to the «authentic voice» of Saussure. This paper investigates a central issue of Saussurean theory of language, the conception of language as an autonomous system of signs, which contains a puzzling antinomy: if the langue is an autonomous system of «pure values», speakers could not use it to communicate among them.
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