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. 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. Only if speech is defined as an activity can one hope to arrive at a ‘total’ object: the total field, or, rather, field of action, that connects representation and expression.