Determinación y entorno: 60 años después

Abstract

One of the most important contributions from Coseriu’s extremely productive Uruguayan period in the 1950s is Determinación y entorno. Dos problemas de una lingüística del hablar (‘Determination and Surrounding Fields. Two problems of a linguistics of speaking’). The paper was originally published in Spanish, in the German journal Romanistisches Jahrbuch in 1955–56. Here, Coseriu introduces some of his basic linguistic concepts, like the distinction between the universal, the historical and the individual linguistic level. He also inverts the doctrine attributed to de Saussure that all relevant linguistic problems should be considered departing from the level of langue, claiming the opposite: according to Coseriu, “speaking” (‘el hablar’), the speaker’s activity, is the key to all linguistic issues. The first part of Coseriu’s paper offers a theory of nominal determination and the second part a sketch of what later would be called pragmatics: a theory of how a sophisticated relationship between linguistic signs and “surrounding fields” interacts in communication in order to create “sense” (‘sentido’), the individual and concrete meaning of a (written or spoken) text. This paper revisits the main aspects of Coseriu’s contribution in the light of some comments made by Coseriu in an interview in the 1990s and it discusses the reception (and the lack of reception) of Coseriu’s text, which was in fact part of a much larger, yet unpublished,...