Content-related grammar
Content-related grammar is a branch of linguistics developed by Leo Weisgerber . It is based on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language . It had a major influence on German (and international) linguistics of the 20th century as well as on German school grammar in the 1950s and 1960s and the basic concept of the Duden grammar at that time .
Presentation of the theory
Every word in a language has a sound side and a content side. The sounds (the outer, "bodily" form of the words) can be recorded in writing and thus enable a sound-related systematic description and research of the languages, as it is defined in dictionaries and grammars. The content (the inner, "spiritual" form of the words) must first be revitalized by the speaker, listener or reader, before they can be used for world orientation or interpersonal communication . Apart from the artificial technical languages, they are neither definable nor fixable, but have become available to the individual members of a language community through their language acquisition . Only on this basis can language participants exchange their thoughts in their language. Both sides of the word (sound and content) are inextricably linked like the two sides of a piece of paper ( Ferdinand de Saussure ).
In the naive understanding of language, most speakers assume that the word contents are given as the “meanings” of the words in “reality” and that this is the reason why one can communicate with one another. However, each language has its own system of terms in which what has become important for a language community in the course of its history has been “brought up”. Every language thus constitutes its own “ worldview ”, which distinguishes it from other languages just as clearly as the sound.
Wilhelm von Humboldt put it this way:
“Several languages are not as many names for a thing; there are different views of the same, and if the thing is not an object of the external senses, there are often as many things formed differently by each ... "
Two examples may illustrate this:
- In our “body parts” we differentiate (in German) between fingers and toes. No German would say they have toes on their hands or fingers on their feet. For relatives of others, e.g. B. Romance language communities are different: They have "fingers" (ital. Ditto, span. Dedo, French. Doigt) on their hands and feet and must therefore, if necessary, their toes as "foot fingers" - dito del piede - from the Differentiate between "hand fingers".
- The differences between the languages are even more serious (and more difficult to recognize) when it comes to abstract words: wherever we speak of luck in German without differentiation, the Spanish distinguish between suerte and felicidad , the English between luck and happiness , the French even between chance , fortune and bonheur and can therefore make it much clearer whether they are talking about chance happiness or inner harmony and bliss.
Strictly speaking, no word in a certain language can be translated one hundred percent into another. The "Comparative Linguistics" established by Humboldt has therefore turned to linguistic content and tried to research and describe it scientifically. On this theory and on the research of other linguists (Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernst Cassirer , Jost Trier , Walter Porzig and others) is based the "content-related linguistics" founded and developed by Leo Weisgerber, which he has developed since his habilitation thesis "Language as a social form of knowledge" (1924 ) has been presented in five decades and in many writings and expanded together with his employees - for example in the large-scale project "Language and Community". This project encompassed not only the theory of words (especially the research of the “word fields”), but also the area of word formation (“word stalls” and “word niches”) and sentence theory (“sentence construction plans”) and their semantic effects. However, Leo Weisgerber regards the content analysis of languages only as a partial aspect of linguistics, which must be supplemented by further perspectives (“performance-related” and “effect-related” linguistic research) in order to arrive at a “holistic” view of languages.
literature
- Wilhelm von Humboldt: Collected Writings, ed. from the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Berlin 1903 ff. (Especially Volume IV and Volume VII)
- Ferdinand de Saussure: Cours de Linguistique Générale. Paris 1916
- Ernst Cassirer: Philosophy of symbolic forms. 1st part: The language. Berlin 1923
- Jost Trier: The German vocabulary in the sense of the mind. The story of a linguistic field. Heidelberg 1931.
- Hennig Brinkmann : The German language. Shape and performance. Düsseldorf 1962.
- Rudolf Hoberg: The doctrine of the linguistic field. 2nd edition Düsseldorf 1973.
- Helmut Gipper: Building blocks of language content research. Düsseldorf 1963.
- Leo Weisgerber: Language as a social form of knowledge (1924), ed. by Bernhard Lauer and Rudolf Hoberg. Kassel 2008.
- Leo Weisgerber: The content-related grammar. Düsseldorf 1953.
- Leo Weisgerber: The four stages in the study of languages. Düsseldorf 1963.
- Leo Weisgerber: The spiritual side of language and its exploration. Düsseldorf 1971.
- Bernhard Weisgerber (Ed.): Leo Weisgerber. Life and work. Kassel 2000.
- Bernhard Weisgerber: Language as a World View. To the sources of Leo Weisgerber's language theory. In: Lingua ac Communitas 10. Warszawa-Poznań 2000, pp. 3-16.
- Hadumod Bußmann (Ed.): Lexicon of Linguistics. 3rd, updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-520-45203-0 .
- Jürgen Dittmann: Language theory of content-related linguistics. Part 1/2. In: Deutsche Sprache 8, 1980, Heft 1, 40–74; Issue 2, 157-176. Online (PDF; 6.7 MB)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ (Wilhelm von Humboldt: Gesammelte Schriften (Academy edition), Volume VII / 2. Berlin 1908, p. 602)