Roland Posner
From Russian formalism to glossematics
European semioticians between World Wars I and II
Achim Eschbach
Karl Bühler's conception of the sign and its relation to
Wittgenstein's later philosophy
Kvetoslav Chvatík
Jan Mukarovskı, Husserl and Carnap
John Michael Krois
Ernst Cassirer's semiotics of the symbolic forms
H. Walter Schmitz
Searle is in fashion, Mannoury is not: speech and hearing acts in the Dutch
Significs movement
Investigation
Annemarie Lange-Seidl
Semiotics at the universities of the Federal Republics of Germany and Austria and
Switzerland
Introduction
From Russian formalism to glossematics
European semioticians between World Wars I and II
Roland Posner, Technical University Berlin
Summary. Semioticians working in Europe between World War I and II developed
their approaches to the theory of signs in accordance with the local
discussions in the centers of European intellectual life. They differed in the
terms which they coined in order to refer to their goals, "Structuralism"
(Jakobson), "Functionalism" (Mathesius and Mukarovskı), "Philosophy of
Symbolic
Forms" (Cassirer), "Umwelt Research" (von Uexküll), "Structural
Description"
(Carnap), "Sematology" (Bühler), "Significs" (Mannoury), and
"Glossematics"
(Hjelmslev); but they discovered more and more that these terms only focused on
different aspects of positions and oppositions they shared: against atomism and
mechanism they all developed a holistic approach; against formalism they
investigated sign function; against psychologism they showed the possibility of
an inter-subjective analysis of meaning; against biographism and historicism
they favored synchronic studies; against academic conservatism they introduced
criteria for the criticism of sign behavior; against the self-isolation of the
academic disciplines they practiced interdisciplinarity. The article sketches
the historical context in which the semioticians that are treated in the other
articles of this issue were working.
Karl Bühler's conception of the sign and its relation
to Wittgenstein's later philosophy
Achim Eschbach, University GH Essen
Summary. The article reconstructs the development of Bühler's conception of the
sign until his emigration in 1938 and discusses, on that basis, the content of
two unpublished sematological works by Bühler. It relates Bühler's thinking
with that of the later Wittgenstein and argues that Wittgenstein's dissociation
from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus was partially influenced by Bühler's
teaching in the Vienna of the 1920s.
Jan Mukarovskı, Husserl and Carnap
Kvetoslav Chvatík, University of Constance
Summary. After giving a sketch of Mukarovskı's academic career, the article
outlines his conception of the semiotics of art, relating it to the famous
"Theses" of the Linguistic Circle of Prague. The autonomy of the aesthetic
sign
and its basis in the aesthetic function of semiosis are discussed with respect
to the physicalistic and psychologistic approaches to the theory of signs
current at the beginning of the twentieth century. The relationship of
Mukarovskı's thinking to Husserl's phenomenology and to the philosophy of
science of Carnap and the Vienna Circle is treated in detail.
Ernst Cassirers semiotics of symbolic forms
John Michael Krois, Emory University, Atlanta
Summary. The article presents a systematic and historical introduction to
Cassirer's theory of signs. Part 1 outlines Cassirer's life and works and
describes the influence other thinkers had on him. Parts 2 and 3 sketch
Cassirer's approach to the problem of meaning and to "semiotics". Part 4
examines his central concepts of "symbolic form" and "symbolic
pregnance". Part
5 summarizes his conception of a framework for semiotic research.
Searle is in fashion, Mannoury is not: speech and
hearing acts in the Dutch Significs movement
H. Walter Schmitz, University of Bonn
Summary. The article compares the semiotic conceptions of Mannoury and the
Significs movement in the Netherlands with the approach to the theory of speech
acts developed later by Austin, Searle, and British Analytical Philosophy. In
contrast with speech acts, language acts in Mannoury's sense are not mere
applications of independently existing word meaning and sentence meaning but
the basis for their genesis. Language acts are not restricted to speakers only
but include the actions of hearers and the mutual expectations of speakers and
hearers. The article analyses the intricate interaction of memory, internal
experience, perception, volition, and emotion in the speaker's and hearer's
performance of a language act, thereby laying the groundwork for a typology of
such acts.
