Ricerc@Sapienza

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 naïve intuition that languages are different, and that each of them offers a “vision of the world”, becomes an unscientific statement – opposed to a universalism – save as it is explained in the framework of a theory of language and languages. The 20th century crusade against the pros and cons of linguistic relativity often misunderstood the hypothesis by Humboldt, Boas, Neo-Humboldtians and even by Sapir, emphasizing a “Whorfian relativism” flowing into a trivial determinism.

Leo Weisgerber’s and Jost Trier’s Wortfeldtheorie is still considered the most consistent outcome of post-Saussurean structural semantics as well as the first step towards an “ontological structuralism”. One of their aims was to reconcile the impasse born out of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s distinction between Energeia and Ergon, which exploded in the 20th century dispute between structural semantics and cognitive and pragmatic approaches.