Saskia Daalder and Andreas Musolff (2011).

Foundations of pragmatics in
functional linguistics. In: Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick (eds.).
Foundations of Pragmatics. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 1). Berlin/New York:
W. de Gruyter, 229-260.

1. Introduction

The relatively young discipline of linguistic pragmatics has had forbears in several older

branches of linguistics. This chapter focuses on important “prefigurations” of parts of linguistic

pragmatics from the late nineteenth century to around 1970 which were informed by a

“functional” view of language. We view “functional linguistics” as the study of language that

starts its research with a focus on the functions of language in social life: the effects of language

use, differentiated as to types of communicators, types of contexts and types of language uses.

This includes the analysis of the primarily intended goals of the speech participants in their

speaking and reacting as well as the study of the long-time effects of language use in the life of

the individual and in the history of the language.

One could name quite a few functionally inclined linguists of that period whose theories are

to some extent congenial to modern pragmatics, starting with the theorists Dwight Whitney

(1827–1894), Michel Bréal (1832–1915), Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) and Henry

Sweet (1845–1912) and ending with, e.g., André Martinet (1908–1999) and Michael Halliday

(*1925). However, in this article we will confine ourselves to results of functional linguistics that

have actually been transmitted to linguistic pragmatics and may be counted among its

foundations. Such results are found foremost in the works of four theorists: the German

psychologist Karl Bühler (1879–1963), the Czech scholar of English Vilém Mathesius (1882–

1945), the Russian general linguist and scholar of Slavonic languages Roman Jakobson (1896–

1982) and the British general linguist Michael Halliday. Of these, we will discuss the relevant

theories of the first three.1 Bühler proposed an influential model of three fundamental “language
functions”, which Jakobson came to extend to the model with six such functions that has had a

strong impact on pragmatics, the ethnography of communication and social semiotics.2

Furthermore, both Bühler and Jakobson analysed the functioning of the deictic elements of

language, emphasising their role in the “situated” nature of language use. Mathesius, who was

more specifically concerned with the comparison of living languages as to their possibilities of

expression, provided the foundations of the functional analysis of utterances in terms of the

notions “theme” and “rheme” (“topic”–“comment”), which has become one of the stock items of

pragmatic analysis. For their ideas in this domain, both Bühler and Mathesius were indebted to

the work of the older and less well-known psychologically oriented German linguist Philipp

Wegener (1848–1916), who held views that also show a strong affinity to those of modern

linguistic pragmatics. In our sections 2–5, we will in turn discuss the contributions by Wegener,

Bühler, Mathesius and Jakobson. In the concluding section 6, we consider the questions of

whether and how their insights into the functionality of language can still be of value for

linguistic pragmatics. In our view, these insights still provide valid reasons to integrate the

description of elements of the situational context into linguistic analysis itself and thus to

question the wisdom of completely separating research into the system of language from

pragmatics, the study of its use.

2. Philipp Wegener

Philipp Wegener (1848–1916), a classics teacher, grammar school headmaster and

psychological linguist from Northern Germany, developed in a relatively small body of work a

remarkably modern, communication-oriented analysis of language.3 It resulted from his

opposition against a particular claim of contemporary historical linguistics. The Neogrammarian

2
theorists had acknowledged the relevance of psychological factors for processes such as the

borrowing of linguistic elements by one language or dialect from another, but not for so-called

“internal”, primarily phonetic language change, which was thought to be caused purely by

physiological mechanisms. Motivated by his study of developments in the local dialects,

Wegener wished to demonstrate the concrete psychological and communicative background also

of “internal” changes, and this forms the first topic in his 1885 publication Investigations into the

Fundamental Questions on the Use of Language (Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des

Sprachlebens).4 Wegener uses the key concept of “automatisation”: changed phonetic

realisations may appear in hindsight not to fulfil any special goals, but they are in fact the results

of conscious choices by speakers, made at one point in time, of alternative possibilities with

special communicative effects, which subsequently have become automatised through habit. A

communicative basis can also be seen in the ontogeny of language. In time, the child learns to

use sound patterns with meanings of a general nature, but this develops only after a stage in

which a particular vocal expression is a purposive action, essentially connected to the child’s

momentary needs and meant to appeal to the carers for help (Wegener [1885] 1991: 4–19).

Wegener goes on to claim that the general purpose of speaking is indeed to influence the

actions, volition or thoughts of another person in a way the speaker thinks worthwhile (Wegener

1991: 64–67, 180). He has no use for the well-known subjectivist picture of the individual

speaker who, in speaking, merely “mirrors” his own thoughts; such a view would make the idea

of communication as accommodation between different minds all but void (Wegener 1902: 402).

Focusing rather on the role of the hearer, Wegener emphasises that the hearer is the true locus of

meaning, because he constructs meaning first and foremost not from linguistic cues but

according to his knowledge of the world and of the purposes of social action, helped further by

his inferential abilities. Within this dialogical theory of meaning, the function of the words and

grammatical elements the speaker presents is to help organise the hearer’s expectations

3
(Wegener 1991: 157–158, 180–182).

The importance of the asymmetrical interaction between speaker and hearer is highlighted in

the detailed analysis of many grammatical constructions that Wegener provides in his book. As

the general functional structure of utterances Wegener proposes a bipartition consisting of

“exposition” (“Exposition”) and “predicate” (“Prädicat”).5 The “predicate” carries the core

function of the utterance, it indicates the new and important material for the situation of

utterance, and whatever effect is achieved in the hearer is connected primarily to this part. The

“exposition” is everything in the utterance that the speaker has deemed necessary for the hearer

to situate the information contained in the predicate in the way it is meant to be situated

(Wegener 1911; 1991: 19–22).

Elements of the situation itself may provide enough information to let the predicate do its

work, as Wegener explains. Any aspects of the hearer’s momentary attention, such as a context

of actions that have just been carried out (or are in the process of being carried out), a topic from

the social or institutional situation at hand or an element from the general cultural situation, can

be sufficient for him to understand an unaccompanied predicate “Well done” as uttered by the

speaker. Language thus need not always be “congruous” to what the mind understands (Wegener

1991: 21–27).6 However, an “exposition” of linguistic material is often added to help achieve

clarity as to the “situated” fact in relation to which the predicate has to be understood. Note that

according to Wegener, the exposition need not always precede the predicate; there may be many

reasons for a speaker to choose the reverse ordering. Intonation, but also grammar, can fulfil the

task of indicating to the hearer just what part of the utterance has which role.

Wegener (1991: 47–60) also relates important phenomena of word semantics to his

communicative bipartition of utterances.7 It is not the same for a word to appear in the exposition

of an utterance or to appear in the predicate. The words of the exposition are used by the hearer

to determine the real-world referent, and their meanings should therefore be relatively

4
“congruous” to the relevant thought. By contrast, words chosen for the predicate may well have

a variable, only loosely-fitting relation to their real-world referent and often have a metaphorical

character. For his precise understanding, the hearer can rely on inferences that are drawn from

elements of the situation and from expositional parts of the utterance. When such inferences

become automatised through repeated use, the word meaning loses its flexibility, increases in its

“congruousness” to thought and thereby becomes appropriate to fulfil a role also in the

expositional parts of utterances. To give a modern example: it is often said, figuratively, that “the

family is the cornerstone of society”. The phrase has become so well-known that the original

predicate part (“the cornerstone of society”) can now also be used in a role of exposition and still

be understood to have the family as referent: “the cornerstone of society is in trouble”. But this

does not yet hold unrestrictedly for “cornerstone” on its own; of course, this could well be a

further development. The process as sketched amounts to semantic change and, more

specifically, the well-attested, continuous “fading” (“abblassen”) of metaphors (Wegener 1991:

51–57).

It is an interesting fact that in this picture, pragmatic analysis can explain linguistic

phenomena that are usually considered to be semantic or grammatical in nature. Pragmatics

could thus be conceived of as an overarching discipline encompassing linguistics — the full

potential of such a conception does not seem to be exhausted by modern pragmaticists.8

Although Wegener’s approach was appreciated and taken into account by such functionalist

theorists as the important Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) and the

British linguists Alan Gardiner (1879–1963) and Michael Halliday,9 it never gained real

notoriety in general linguistics and was not used by the founders of modern linguistic

pragmatics. Nor did the “revival” of Wegener’s pioneering ideas in works by the German

communication theorists Gerold Ungeheuer (1930–1982) and Johann Juchem (1939–2003)10

succeed in making them known beyond a rather small circle of pragmaticists. However, some of

5
Wegener’s proposals did reach modern pragmatics through an “intermediary”. Karl Bühler

helped spreading Wegener’s analysis of the interweaving, in each utterance, of the speaker’s

expression of thoughts, the intended effect on the hearer and the representation of a part of

reality. This tripartite analysis had a major influence on the development of Bühler’s theory of

the functioning of language, as can be seen already in one of his earliest linguistic publications

(Bühler 1909b: 119–123).11 It eventually led to Bühler’s model of three language functions, the

“organon model”, to be discussed in section 3.1, which in turn was further differentiated by

Roman Jakobson and became part of linguistic pragmatics in that extended version (see section

5.1).

3. Karl Bühler

3.1. Bühler’s “axiomatic” view of language functions

In 1934, Karl Bühler (1879–1963), Ordinarius professor of psychology at the University of

Vienna, published a monograph entitled Theory of Language. The Representational Function of

Language (Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache). Its introductory First Part

deals with “The Principles of Language Studies”, which include four basic “axioms”. The first of

these axioms, the “organon-model”, is introduced as the “maxim of the three semantic functions”

(Leitsatz von den drei Sinnfunktionen) of all linguistic structures (Bühler 1990: 28; 1934: 22).12

Bühler cites Plato’s definition in Kratylos of language as an organum (‘means’/’tool’) for a

speaker to “inform the other of something about the things” (1990: 30; 1934: 24) to motivate the

term “organon-model”. It was this 1934 version of the model of language “functions” that

inspired a number of later scholars to develop the notion of “Functional Linguistics” with a

6
strong emphasis on pragmatic as well as sociolinguistic aspects, and it is quoted as such in

textbooks to this day.13 Before we look at its systematic theoretical status and further adaptation,

however, we need to analyse its development in Bühler’s own work.

1934 did not mark the starting point of Bühler’s work on “meaning functions” by any means;

rather, it was its climax and almost also its ending, due to the interruption of Bühler’s work in

1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.14 Building on Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938),

Anton Marty’s (1847–1914) and Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) theories of meaning,15 as well

as on his own work on “thought psychology” in the context of the Würzburg school around

Oswald Külpe (1862–1915),16 Bühler had published an article on the “Critical assessment of new

sentence theories” (Kritische Musterung der neuern Theorien des Satzes) as early as 1918, in

which he proposed a triadic model of language “functions” (Leistungen). It is based on the three

main foundations of any meaning-constitutive interaction, i.e.,

1) the speaker whose feelings and attitudes are given “expression” (Kundgabe),

2) the hearer for whom it provides a “stimulus” that elicits reactions (Auslösung),

3) objects or states of affairs that form the referents for representation (Darstellung) (Bühler

1918: 16).

After moving to the Chair of Psychology at Vienna University in 1922, Bühler went on to

develop this triadic model further in two major psychological studies. In The Crisis of

Psychology (Die Krise der Psychologie) of 1927, the model serves as the basis for a critical

assessment of contemporary psychology. The two basic semantic functions of “expression”

(Kundgabe, which, as Bühler emphasises, also includes its receptive counterpart, Kundnahme)

and “guidance” (which also involves mutuality) are present even in animal communication; the

ability to produce “symbolic representations” (of objects/states of affairs), on the other hand, is

characteristic of human communication and helps to adapt the first two functions to a higher

level, so that all three of them are only fully activated in human communication (Bühler 1927:

7
32–33, 37, 50–51). The three functions model thus forms a framework for conceiving of

psychology as the integrated study of “subjective experience”, social “behaviour” and “structures

of objective sense” (1927: 29, 57–62). The enormous conceptual range of this “function”-

concept is evident also in the further monograph on Theory of expression (Ausdruckstheorie) of

1933, where Bühler refers to it as the basis to analyse the relationship between miming, gesture

and language (Bühler 1933a: iii– iv).

With specific respect to linguistics, Bühler explicitly claimed “axiomatic” status for the

functions model in his two articles “The whole of language theory, its system and its parts” (Das

Ganze der Sprachtheorie, ihr Aufbau und ihre Teile) and “The axiomatics of the language

sciences” (Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften), published in 1932 and 1933, respectively.

He now called the functions “expression” (Ausdruck), “appeal” (Appell), and “representation”

(Darstellung) (Bühler 1932: 106; 1933a: 74–90) and incorporated them into a set of four

principles, which prefigure the “axiomatic” introductory part of Sprachtheorie (although they

appear in different order).17 Compared with the earlier versions of the three functions-model,

both articles share with the Sprachtheorie the detailed discussion and acknowledgement of

Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) Cours de linguistique générale (published posthumously

in 1916; German translation published in 1931).

Saussure’s famous lectures had motivated Bühler to reconceptualise language theory from a

“semiological” (Saussure), or as Bühler calls it, “sematological” viewpoint (1990: 33, 42; 1934:

27, 34–35). However, Bühler’s interpretation of the Cours differed in significant ways from

contemporary “structuralist” readings.18 Whilst acknowledging the epoch-making impact of the

Cours (Bühler 1990: 7–8; 1934: 7), he criticises its presentation of the “speech circuit” as a

relapse into 19th century “psycho-physics” and he insists that linguistic communication

comprises different types of signs (1990: 31–34, 42–43; 1934: 25–28, 34–37). Most important in

our context is his discussion of Saussure’s distinction of a linguistique de la langue from a

8
linguistique de la parole. Bühler puts the emphasis not on the langue-aspect, but instead praises

Saussure for having shown “what would have to be discovered in order to be really able to

initiate a linguistique de la parole” (1990: 8; 1934: 7). This foregrounding of the speech/action

aspect of language was at odds with the predominant reading of the Cours as an endorsement of

a system-oriented “core linguistics”. It thus provides a first indication of Bühler’s interest in the

pragmatic orientation as an essential methodological perspective for linguistic research.

Besides the “pragmatically” interpreted Cours, Bühler cites three further works as coming

closest to providing a functionalist grounding of linguistics as an urgently needed “complement

to the old grammar” (1990: 27; 1934: 23):

a) Philipp Wegener’s Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of the Use of Language

([1885] 1991) (discussed in our section 2) had taught Bühler about the listener’s role in the social

action dimension of speech;19

b) Karl Brugmann’s (1849–1919) essay on Indo-European pronoun systems (1904) had

provided him with a theory of demonstrative deixis as a framework to analyse the “speech

situation”;

c) Alan Gardiner’s Theory of Speech and Language (1932), which owed its publication partly

to Bühler’s encouragement.20 Bühler praised it as the “most interesting attempt” to carry out a

project similar to his own but adds the reservation that Gardiner strives exclusively for a

“situational theory of language”, whereas he, Bühler, wants to account also for types of language

use that are “removed from the situation” (Bühler 1990: 28; 1934: 34–35).21

Supported by these three authorities (as well as by the parole-oriented reading of Saussure’s

Cours), the “organon”-model appears in the Sprachtheorie as the first of four axioms; it

postulates three “semantic functions” (semantische Funktionen) for every instance of a

“linguistic sign” (Sprachzeichen):

9
 Es ist Symbol kraft seiner Zuordnung zu Gegenständen und Sachverhalten, Symptom

(Anzeichen, Indicium) kraft seiner Abhängigkeit vom Sender, dessen Innerlichkeit es

ausdrückt, und Signal kraft seines Appells an den Hörer, dessen äußeres und inneres

Verhalten es steuert wie andere Verkehrszeichen. (Bühler 1934: 28).

It is a symbol by virtue of its co-ordination to objects and states of affairs, a symptom

(Anzeichen, indicium: index) by virtue of its dependence on the sender, whose inner state it

expresses, and a signal by virtue of its appeal to the hearer, whose inner and outer behaviour

it directs as do other communicative signs. (Bühler 1990: 35).

It is in this version that the “organon”-model has entered pragmatic-functionalist textbooks as

a well-known historical reference (see above). However, its presentation in the Sprachtheorie as

the first axiom (possibly meant to underline its pre-eminence) is less convincing than its

introduction in the Axiomatics essay from a year earlier. In that essay it appears as the last axiom

and forms the conclusion of the previous argumentation.22 In the Sprachtheorie, the model is

followed first by illustrative comments on various styles and registers in which either of the three

functional dimensions appears dominant (e.g. poetry, rhetoric, scientific discourse) and a hint

that its main thesis “will be verified when all three books [on language] that the organon model

requires have been written” (1990: 39; 1934: 33). This hint underlines the point of the subtitle of

Sprachtheorie, “The Representational Function of Language” (Die Darstellungsfunktion der

Sprache): this work does not contain the complete “Theory of Language” whose necessity is

implied by the organon model; it still focuses mainly on the one function that had been the object

of traditional language philosophy and semantics.

This discrepancy, although openly announced, is regrettable from a pragmatic point of view,

for historical reasons (as the three promised books were never completed: The Crisis of

Psychology and Expression Theory contain valuable linguistic insights but have a much wider,

10
psychologically defined remit) as well as in theoretical respects. As a largely programmatic

formulation, the organon model lacks an explication by Bühler that would have clarified its

methodological implications. In the Sprachtheorie itself, the model is only intermittently and

cursorily referred to and does not provide a systematic structuring principle of the book. The

following remarks therefore highlight aspects of the Sprachtheorie that can be most closely

linked to the three functions model, without claiming to give a systematic overview of Bühler’s

opus magnum.

Within the Axiomatics-part of the Sprachtheorie, the second axiom is the “sign-character of

language”, which Bühler takes over not just from Saussure but from the sign-theoretical tradition

going back to the medieval scholastic debates on representation and which he relates in a bold

move to the contemporary phoneme-phone distinction. Bühler’s formula for the principle of the

semantic character of signs is “abstractive relevance” (Bühler 1990: 40–56; 1934: 33–48).

Building on the organon- and sign-axioms, he attempts in axiom III to achieve an integration of

functional and systemic language aspects by way of a cross-classification based on the parole-

langue and ergon-energeia distinctions by Saussure and Humboldt. This yields four perspectives

on language as an object of scientific investigation, i.e. language as (1) “speech action”

(Sprechhandlung), (2) “language work” (Sprachwerk), (3) “speech act” (Sprechakt) and

“language structure” (Sprachgebilde) (Bühler 1990: 57–80; 1934: 48–69).

This schema has been criticised for being terminologically and methodologically

inconsistent.23 Its English translation in the 1990 edition adds further problems as it suggests

“false friends” such as Sprechakt and speech act. Bühler’s understanding of this aspect is far

removed from Austinian, Searlean or Gricean concepts; rather, it rests on the philosophical

notion of “sense-conferring acts” (“sinnverleihende Akte”), which Bühler had adopted from

Husserl. Bühler praises Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen for highlighting sense-conferring

acts as a necessary object of language theory but he criticises the implication of an exclusively

11
subject-centred perspective on meaning constitution, against which he insists on the inter-

subjective side of all use of signs (1990: 73–74; 1934: 63–65; see also Nerlich and Clarke 1996:

194–198, 211–215).

The most interesting aspect of Bühler’s schema from a pragmatic perspective is the category

of the “speech action”, which encapsulates the insight that “all concrete speech is in vital union

with the rest of a person’s meaningful behaviour; it is among actions and is itself an action”

(1990: 61; 1934: 52). In the discussion in the Sprachtheorie Bühler gives only a relatively brief

illustration by way of famous quotations that embody a whole situation (e.g. Caesar’s “alea jacta

est”) and refers to developmental psychology; he also highlights the “field”-character of every

speech action and the importance of the act(ion) history, which includes the language acquisition

process (1990: 65–66; 1934: 56). In the Axiomatics essay, however, Bühler gives a more detailed

explanation, drawing strongly on the action theory developed by the fellow Würzburg School

psychologist Abraham Anton Grünbaum (1885–1932), who had given a paper on “Language as

action” (Sprache als Handlung) at a workshop organised by Bühler at a psychology congress in

Hamburg in 1931 (Bühler 1933a: 50–51). For Grünbaum, every “action” is a dynamic system of

organism and environment (System: Organismus — Umwelt); its constitutive aspects are the

agentive organism’s need (Bedürfnis) and intention (Intention), the active completion

(Erledigung) of the action and the agent’s reaction to the completion (Erledigungsreaktion)

(Grünbaum 1932: 165–173). For the application to the speech action, Bühler re-labels the

“reaction to the completion” as “fulfilment” (Erfüllung) and describes it further as consisting of

the speaker’s conscious realisation that the process of meaning constitution has been concluded

(Bühler 1933a: 50-51).24

In the Sprachtheorie, Grünbaum’s theory is not explicitly mentioned but Bühler uses

Grünbaum’s terminology in some parts and refers for further reading to his own Axiomatics

essay as well as to disputes among the schools of Gestalt theory, where he takes a polemical

12
stance against the supposed “monism” of the Berlin School of Gestalt psychology around Max

Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka (Bühler 1990: 66; 1934: 56). In this allusion-

laden discussion the contours of Bühler’s concept of speech as action are sometimes barely

discernible. There is just one hint that the topic is taken up again in chapter 10, which deals with

the “integration of speaking into other meaningful behaviour”, and more specifically into

different types of “surrounding fields” (Umfelder) (Bühler 1990: 61; 1934: 52). This distance or

detour of six chapters is motivated by Bühler’s more immediate focus on the concept of

“language fields”, which overlaps with the notion of “surrounding fields”, thus leading to a

potentially confusing double-terminology.

Within the Axiomatics-part of Sprachtheorie, the field concept comes into focus in the fourth

axiom, which deals with the syntax-semantics interface under the heading “Word and Sentence:

the S[ymbol]-F[ield]-system of the type language” (Bühler 1990: 81–90; 1934: 69–78), but the

concept also dominates the remainder of the monograph. It serves Bühler to gain an overview of

language phenomena that ranges from phonology and morphology via syntax and case theory to

text theory and stylistics. The principle unifying this theoretical and methodological tour de

force is the distinction between, on the one hand, those aspects of linguistic signs that receive

their precise meaning in the “deictic field” (Zeigfeld), i.e. the spatio-temporal surroundings, the

relationship of speaker and listener, their shared knowledge and action goals, and on the other

hand, those aspects of linguistic signs that are fully integrated in syntagms and are detachable

from the immediate situation, thus forming a “symbol field” (Symbolfeld).25 As a programmatic

outline, this “two-field theory” provides, as Garvin (1994) has pointed out, an alternative to any

rigid “syntax-semantics-pragmatics” distinction and has proved to be a constant source of fresh

insights. In terms of a theoretical focus, however, Bühler’s wide-ranging discussion covers too

many data and theoretical aspects and the important insights from the “organon model” and the

“speech action” concept are taken up only intermittently in the “field”-theoretical chapters. In the

13
following section, we highlight these pragmatically relevant theory aspects without claiming to

provide a comprehensive reconstruction of Bühler’s general field-theoretical framework.

3.2. Linguistic deixis and action

The two main concepts in the Sprachtheorie that are of relevance for linguistic pragmatics are

those of the “deictic field” and the “surrounding fields”, i.e. the context in which speech is

meaningful as social action. Terminologically, both categories are evidently strongly integrated

in Bühler’s overarching “field”-theory, but conceptually they also depend on the three-functions

model. In both cases, the multi-functionality of language and the fundamental importance of the

speaker-hearer relationship, which derive from the “organon model”, are constitutive of Bühler’s

argumentation.

The origin of linguistic indexicality/deixis lies in the I-now-here-position of the speaker,

which serves as the starting point for spatial, temporal and social orientation and co-ordination

between the communication partners (Bühler 1990: 117-136; 1934: 102–120). The interlocutors’

shared horizon can then be extended through the quasi-figurative use of the co-ordinates of the

demonstratio ad oculos (“visual [or other sensory] demonstration”) for the purpose of

“imagination-oriented deixis”. When referring to objects that are not immediately “given” in the

discourse situation, speaker and hearer must either project them linguistically into that situational

context (e.g. by putting a problem “before” themselves) or, vice versa, project their own situation

co-ordinates onto an imagined context, or use a mixture of both. Such “imagination-oriented

deixis” is present already in everyday language use and marks the first step in the gradual

emancipation of language from the immediate situational context (1990: 158–166; 1934: 140–

148). The highest developmental “stage” of deictic language use is reached when indexical

language signs are used anaphorically and cataphorically as “joints of speech”, e.g. as relative

14
pronouns, text-deictic prepositions, prepositional adverbs or conjunctions (1990: 438–452; 1934:

385–397). Here, the symbol-field is reconstructed along deictic co-ordinates; at the same time,

deictic signs are used to “demonstrate” relationships within a representational context.26

The second main pragmatically interesting discussion in the Sprachtheorie, which Bühler had

already flagged up in the context of the Axiomatics section when dealing with the “speech

action”, is chapter 10. Its title provides an additional typology of “surrounding” fields: “The

sympractical, the symphysical and the synsemantic field of Language Signs” (1990: 175; 1934:

154). Again, as in the case of the deixis-symbolising continuum, Bühler conceptualises the field-

series as a cline of abstraction. Linguistic signs can be tied closely to a specific situation or

specific objects (= the sympractical and symphysical fields) and so remain situation-bound. The

more strongly they are integrated into the linguistic “con-text” (= the synsemantic field)

however, the more “liberated” they are from the specific circumstances of the speech situation.

In some genres, e.g. algebraic formula systems, the liberation from concrete, situation-related

content is almost taken to the maximum (cf. chapters 11, 25 of Sprachtheorie). The overlap

between the “synsemantic” field and the symbol field (1990: 179–189; 1934: 159–168) blurs the

boundaries between the two “field-theoretical” concepts to some extent,27 which may be

indicative of Bühler’s difficulty to combine his focus on functional aspects of language with the

perceived necessity of integrating these insights into the predominant contemporary tendencies

of explaining language mainly as a system of representation.

In the context of the “surrounding fields”, Bühler comes closest to a pragmatic interpretation

of language data in the passages dealing with the “sympractical field”, which presuppose his

three-functions axiom and Grünbaum’s “action field” theory (see above). The sympractical field

includes what would be called in modern terminology the “situational context” (as opposed to

“co-text”), which communication partners need to know (and share) in order to be able to

disambiguate situation-bound utterances such as short commands, requests, greetings etc. Such

15
utterances had been viewed traditionally as deficient, on account of not being syntactically

“well-formed” sentences (1990: 176–179, 187–189; 1934: 156–159, 166–167).28 Through

examples such as that of a patron in a coffee-house asking for a particular type of coffee by way

of uttering something like “an espresso, please”29 and of a passenger in a tram car choosing

between types of tickets, Bühler explains that an ”ellipsis” interpretation is mistaken. In such

cases, the speaker does not have to produce semantically explicit or grammatically well-formed

utterances, because the interlocutor, on account of shared knowledge of the situation (the

Umfeld), understands motives and plan for the action (in modern terminology: the action

“schema” or “script”) and uses the language sign only as a diacritic. The situational context

provides a sufficient “fulfilment” of all meaning functions in the action field: the utterance is not

elliptical but rather, in Bühler’s terminology, “empractical” (1990: 177–179; 1934: 155–158).

Generalizing from Bühler’s hints, one can argue that language use is empractical in principle,

insofar as it is always aimed at resolving ambiguities of intersubjective co-operation and based

on some degree of shared background knowledge (or at least, background assumptions). Whilst

Bühler never formulated any communicative “co-operation” or “relevance” principles in the

Sprachtheorie, his notion of the sympractical field as the basic action-structure in which

language functions operate can be viewed at least as compatible with more recent pragmatic and

relevance-theoretical approaches.30

4. Vilém Mathesius and the Prague Linguistic Circle

From 1930 onward, Bühler had scattered connections with members of the Prague Linguistic

Circle, the avant-garde group of linguists that propagated a view of language as a “functional

system” with “structural laws” (Prague Linguistic Circle [1929] 1983: 77–79). Founded by the

16
Czech linguist and scholar of English Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945) in 1926, the Circle united

under Mathesius’s presidency some of his Czechoslovak colleagues and linguists of other

nationalities who lived in Prague or nearby, notably a number of Russian and Ukrainian émigrés.

Whereas the “functional” point of view was the original contribution of Mathesius himself,

Roman Jakobson, the Russian vice-president of the Circle, added a “structuralist”, much more

system-oriented approach. Not surprisingly, Mathesius’s and Jakobson’s legacies to pragmatics

vary. The following section will detail Mathesius’s functionalist findings that are relevant for

pragmatics; in section 5, we will turn to foundations of pragmatics deriving from Jakobson’s

work.

4.1. Mathesius’s functional view of language

Since his earliest linguistic writings in the first decade of the century, Mathesius had argued

for a view of language as a means to an end.31 In the years of his university education in Prague,

his general methodological outlook was formed by the call for “concreteness” from the Czech

philosopher Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937), who coupled this appeal with the desirability of

democratising scientific and philosophical education (Masaryk 1887). Science had to give

priority to the study of “close and accessible phenomena”, including their comparative analysis;

this would prepare for historical research at a later stage.32 Accordingly, Mathesius sought his

linguistic inspirations in the works of opponents of Neogrammarian dogmatism, such as Sweet,

Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), von der Gabelentz and Wegener (Mathesius [1936] 1966: 137), and

he became an advocate of synchronic language study.

The ideal of “concreteness” took shape in the emphasis which Mathesius laid on the inherent

synchronic variability of linguistic phenomena among individuals of a language community as

17
well as in the speech of a single individual; he spoke of the “static oscillation” in speech and

called this aspect of language its “potentiality” (Mathesius [1911] 1983a: 3). He stressed that the

seeming homogeneity of language is a product of the method of analysis and that without the

phonetic phenomenon of “synchronic oscillation”, languages could not change (Mathesius

[1911] 1983a: 4, 32). These claims sound very modern and they were indeed approvingly cited

in the influential paper on variability and language change by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog

(1968: 167–169), although these authors also criticised Mathesius for not having pointed to the

sociolinguistic regularities that are inherent in variation.

In his ideas on “synchronic oscillation” in the domain of semantics, Mathesius was at first

strongly influenced by the stylistics of the Geneva linguist Charles Bally (1865–1947) as well as

by the “idealistic” approach of the German scholar of Romance languages Karl Vossler (1872–

1949). This stance implied an emphatic interest in the expression of the speaking individual

rather than in the social character of language, which he saw as having been overstated by

nineteenth-century linguistics (Mathesius [1911] 1983a: 29–31, 35–36; [1926] 1983b: 52–53). In

his later work, Mathesius redressed the balance to some extent by way of an acknowledgement

of the dominance, at least for language change, of the communicative function of language vis-à-

vis the “original” expressive function (Mathesius [1926] 1983b: 54–55). However, on account of

his continued interest in stylistics he kept a predilection for the expressive function and defined

his “functional” point of view as one that “takes the meaning or function as its starting point and

tries to find out by which means it is expressed” (Mathesius [1926] 1983b: 56–58; also [1929]

1983c: 122–125). Mathesius thus came to neglect some of the necessary focus on the hearer as

the key player in the constitution of meaning, something which Wegener and Bühler had already

reached in their work. This has to be viewed as a general restriction of Praguian functional

linguistics in its foundational role for pragmatics.

Mathesius’s emphasis on the expressive function is understandable in the light of his long-

18
standing interest in the comparative study of word order patterns, which was first kindled by the

work of the French scholar of Ancient Greek Henri Weil (1818–1909) (Weil [1844] 1887).

Confronted with differences in word order between Czech and English, Mathesius saw

languages of different “character”. Where a speaker of Czech usually filled the slot of the

grammatical subject with the agent of the action expressed by the verb, an English speaker

appeared to prefer the “theme” (“Thema”) of the utterance for this role. The Czech speaker

therefore was relatively free to order his sentence parts according to their contextual status of

“theme” or “nucleus” (“rheme”). For the English speaker to have a similar possibility readily at

hand, the language had developed grammatical means for alternative choices of the grammatical

subject, i.e. several types of passive constructions, which could be observed to make out a

considerable proportion of English verbal constructions (Mathesius 1929: 202–203; [1929]

1983c: 126–128, 133–134; 1930). The “character” of a language was thought to explain the links

between such descriptive facts of different types.

Mathesius’s “characterology” (or: language typology) thus relied on what he called the

“actual articulation”33 of utterances, which was to be distinguished from its logico-grammatical

articulation. The notion of “actual articulation” pointed to the inherent “situatedness” of the

structure in a specified context, and to its “concrete” quality; in short: it was a pragmatic

structuring. Specifically, it consisted of a “basis” or “theme” on the one hand and a “nucleus”,

“enunciation”, or “rheme” on the other.34 In a formulation from Mathesius (1975a: 81): “The

element about which something is stated may be said to be the basis of the utterance or the

theme, and what is stated about the basis is the nucleus of the utterance or the rheme.”

To an extent, Mathesius’s proposal of a “functional sentence perspective” resembles

Wegener’s ideas on the bipartition of utterances in “exposition” and “predicate” that we

discussed in section 2. Still, we note the less pronounced communicative emphasis with

Mathesius: the hearer is absent in his formulation, and even the speaker is no more than implied.

19
Furthermore, Mathesius’s insight in the role of the situation is much less developed. In any case,

there appear to be no references by Mathesius to Wegener’s theories on this subject, at least not

from the period in which Mathesius developed his notion of “functional sentence structure” (the

late 1920s). We have to decide that the relation is probably not a direct one.

It is certain however that Mathesius’s notions found favour in many quarters of (pragmatic)

linguistics and have become, under some of their original names or as “topic” and “comment”,

classics of pragmatic analysis (see, e.g., Lyons 1977: 501–512; Levinson 1983: 88–89).35

5. Roman Jakobson

5.1. Jakobson’s model of linguistic functions

The Russian general linguist and scholar of Slavonic languages Roman Jakobson (1896–

1982) was intrigued by the seemingly autonomous functionality (“teleology”, “self-movement”)

of language change all his life (Liberman 1987). For a long time, Jakobson hoped to be able to

account for it with the help of a Hegelian logic of “system change” (Toman 1995: 171–176). But

in the milieu of the Prague Linguistic Circle, he gradually came to recognise that the stages of a

change in progress had in fact to be conceived as different simultaneous facts, or styles, within

the language system. Especially after Jakobson’s emigration to the United States in 1941, his

teleological point of view shifted to a focus on the less mysterious functions in a “means-ends

model” of a synchronic “system of systems” (Jakobson 1963: 107).

In his new homeland, Jakobson found the study of language to have been, as he remarked at a

conference of anthropologists and linguists in 1952, “strongly bulwarked by the impressive

achievement of two conjoined disciplines — the mathematical theory of communication and

20
information theory” (Jakobson 1953: 12). This led him to discuss the factors of the

communication process that were treated, e.g., in the well-known publication by Shannon and

Weaver (1949). In his paper, Jakobson enumerates the four factors connected to the message in

the information theorists’ terminology (sender, receiver, topic of the message, code) and points

to the variability of their relative importance for a message. Apart from being associated with the

factor of topic (information), a message may also be “oriented” toward the sender or the

receiver, leading to a “function” of the message different from a purely informative one, or, as

the case may be, a hierarchical bundle of several functions (Jakobson 1953: 13). These three

basic function varieties can be considered equivalent to Bühler’s (1990, 1934) functions of

representation, expression and appeal, in the three-functions model that Jakobson subsequently

refers to as the “traditional model of language” (Jakobson 1960: 355; [1976] 1985: 115).36 It

should be kept in mind however that Jakobson views the language functions as systemic facts

throughout (facts of a “system of systems”). This distinguishes his theory from Bühler’s

approach (recall Bühler’s championing of parole) and even more from Wegener’s; indeed, we

are not aware of any references to Wegener in Jakobson’s work.

Jakobson had come to linguistics via the study of Russian verse and of poetics in general (cf.

Rudy 1978; Toman 1995; Waugh and Rudy 1998: 2262–2265). Together with his compatriot,

the literary scholar Jurij Tynjanov (1894–1943), he had made a case for a parallel development

of language, literature and other cultural systems by structural necessity; there was to be no

separation of the interconnected codes of language and literature (Tynjanov and Jakobson

([1928] 1972). In a section of the 1929 “Theses” of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Jakobson and

the Czech literary scholar Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975)37 had sought to contrast poetic language

with “communicative” language. They had stated that “poetic expression is directed towards the

way of expression itself” and that the linguistic means of different levels, which in

communicative speech tend to become automatised, in poetic utterances tend to become

21
foregrounded themselves (Prague Linguistic Circle [1929] 1983: 94; cf. also 89). It is this idea

that Jakobson takes up when he, in his paper from 1953, adds a fourth, “poetic” function of

language to Bühler’s set of three. For a message that is partly loosened from its referential

meaning by being oriented towards “its own self”, towards the “palpability” of its signs, the

poetic function of language is at work, be it as the predominant function of a literary fragment or

as a subordinate, additional function of an otherwise “prosaic” message (Jakobson 1953: 14).

Jakobson mentions also a fifth possibility: an orientation of the message toward the factor of

code, interesting because here the code (i.e., the langue) is not just an abstraction but interacts

with language use. The orientational “set” (explained as “Einstellung”) for the code is witnessed

in non-specialist discourse about such linguistic subjects as clarification of code elements, code

switching, bilingualism, areal diffusion, language variation and language change (Jakobson

1953: 14–18). This function is described with more clarity and termed the “metalingual”

function in a publication based on Jakobson’s presidential address at a meeting of the Linguistic

Society of America in 1956 (cf. Jakobson 1985: 116–121). A sixth function is mentioned in that

address as well: Jakobson analyses anthropologist Malinowski’s “phatic communion” function38

as being attached to messages with a set for the factor of “contact”, or “channel”, as when

interlocutors, without much information transfer, check, or revive the physical communication

channel, or keep it going (Jakobson 1985: 115).39

Jakobson (1960: 353–357) sums up the resulting model of six language functions (with some

terminological changes): the referential (denotative, cognitive) function, the emotive

(expressive) function, the conative40 function, the poetic function, the metalingual (or

“glossing”) function and the phatic function. They are explained by the orientation of the

message toward one of the six constitutive factors of speech events, to wit the context referred to

(the referent), the addresser, the addressee, the message, the code, and the contact channel. It is

in this version that Jakobson’s model of language functions has been widely cited by linguists of

22
several persuasions, including theoreticians of linguistic pragmatics (see, e.g., Hymes [1962]

1968: 99, 110–124; Hymes 1983: 334; Lyons 1977: 52–56; Levinson 1983: 41; Schiffrin 1994:

32–33; Duranti 1997: 284–287). It is clear, however, that the model is focused on language as an

undivided phenomenon, in which, just as in Bühler’s approach, the many facets of a pragmatic

nature remain “inclusive”, and therefore partly implicit. In order to gain an unimpeded view of

pragmatic facts, a systematic linguistic pragmatics had still to be drawn out.

5.2. Jakobson’s treatment of deixis

Among the further aspects of Jakobson’s functionalism that are relevant for the development

of linguistic pragmatics, his view of deictic phenomena is the most important. In a publication of

1957, which goes back to a paper delivered in Geneva in 1950 (cf. Jakobson 1950), he treats the

differentia specifica of indexical items such as the personal pronouns I and you (Jakobson [1957]

1971). Like Bühler, Jakobson points to the fact that their precise meaning in context needs to

take into account aspects of the situation, always unique, in which they happen to be used;

adopting Otto Jespersen’s (1860–1943) (1922: 123) term, he calls them “shifters” (Jakobson

1971: 131). Jakobson’s main interest however is focused on the question of the status of these

shifters as elements of the linguistic code, and he insists that their symbolic meaning (for I, “the

addresser of the pronoun instance”, and for you, “the addressee”) should not be neglected either.

Using Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1839–1914) classification of sign modes and specifically

following its interpretation by the American mathematician and philosopher Arthur Burks

(1915–2008), Jakobson argues in favour of according them the status of “indexical symbols”.41

First and second person pronouns in use are associated with the object they represent by an

“existential” relation (i.e., pronoun token and object exist in the same situation), therefore they

23
indeed function as “indices”, just like acts of pointing with the index finger would. However, on

account of their “conventional” relation with the role of speaker or hearer, which in different

language codes holds for different forms (Latin ego, German ich, Russian ja), they partake just

as well of the symbolic mode of signs (Jakobson 1971: 132).42

Whereas the sober-minded Jespersen (1922: 123), in reaction to a remark by the German

idealist philosopher of subjectivity Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), had belittled attempts to

derive deep philosophical conclusions from the “little linguistic trick” involved in using the

pronoun I correctly, Jakobson goes on to develop its theoretical significance further. Considering

the constitutive factors of speech situations, he notices for the shifters an “overlapping” of the

factors Code and Message: their general meaning, which is part of the Code, contains a reference

to the very Message of which the shifter in an instance of its use happens to form a part

(Jakobson 1971: 132). Jakobson explains this possibility by asserting that both Code and

Message can in principle refer as well as be an object of reference; in the specific case of the

shifters, the Code has the function of referring, while the Message is being referred to.43

This explanation takes up a similar remark by the French linguist Émile Benveniste (1902–

1976) in an article about pronouns that was published a year earlier in the Festschrift For Roman

Jakobson (Benveniste [1956] 1966a: 252). Benveniste, likewise anxious to find an aspect of the

Saussurean langue (the Code) within the typical discourse (Message) reality of first and second

person pronouns, goes further than Jakobson in postulating that it is precisely the use of elements

symbolizing the roles of utterer-conceptualiser (énonciateur) and “allocutee” of a discourse

event which leads to language users’ consciousness of their role as “subjects”. Those symbolic

features of the language system then get parcelled out into psychological reality. Benveniste also

mentions that the process is strengthened by various verbal forms that align with the perspective

of the utterer of the discourse (Benveniste 1966a: 254–255; also [1958] 1966b: 258–263). In his

1957 article, Jakobson indeed uses the theory of the shifters to set up a new classification of

24
verbal categories, in particular those of Russian. Like first and second person pronouns, verbal

shifter categories (several forms in the paradigms of person, mood, tense and evidentiality) have

an encoded meaning in which the speech event (the message) and/or one of its participants play a

decisive role (Jakobson 1971: 133–147).44

The relevance of the idea of the interweaving of Code (langue) and Message (instance of

discourse) to linguistic pragmatics becomes evident when the phenomenon of the shifters is

described as a fact about speech events rather than the linguistic code. It can be said then that by

means of various indexical elements of the language, speech events often encode, or “index”,

important components of the community’s social life. It was the American anthropologist Dell

Hymes (1927–2009) who realised that on this basis, Jakobson’s speech functions could be

extended and seen to be differently organised for different communities, opening up “an

additional realm of structure” (Hymes 1983: 335). This was to result in the ethnography of

speaking and more broadly, the ethnography of communication (Hymes [1962] 1968: 110–129;

1964; 1972).

6. Conclusion

Philipp Wegener, Karl Bühler, Vilém Mathesius and Roman Jakobson — all of them

characteristically “modernist” theorists — were fully aware of the pervasive relevance of

language in countless domains of human life and culture. They projected the pragmatic aspects

which they had identified, such as the multifunctionality of language, the functional structure of

the sentence and the nature of deixis, onto a rich picture of language that did not separate

semantic from pragmatic phenomena and often contained no fixed answer to the question as to

what is language “itself” and what is its use. Seen from a present-day perspective, their works

25
may appear to be lacking in systematic treatment of pragmatic facts. By the same token,

however, they have had — and continue to have — potential not for just one but many branches

of linguistic pragmatics. Wegener’s ideas for the linguistic analysis of utterances together with

their embedding situations may still be used to further loosen the grip of the received wisdom

about the structure of linguistic utterances as phenomenal entities per se. Similarly, Bühler’s and

Jakobson’s theories of the functions of language, the associated models of the communication

situation and the deictic signs/“shifters” that derive their specific meaning from it offer the

chance to review the “immunity” of the theory of the language system to results of the analysis

of language use.

26
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1
For Halliday, see the contribution by Hasan in this volume.
2
Outside the discipline of linguistics, Bühler’s model has been taken up by Jürgen Habermas,
who in his Theory of communicative action (1981) uses the three functional dimensions as
reference points for a model of social communication. According to Habermas, every speaker,
when making a meaningful utterance, intends it to be understood by the hearer as legitimate
(within the social context), truthful (i.e. as an expression of the speaker’s own convictions) and
true (in relation to objective states of affairs). Even though these assumptions are often
disappointed in actual communication, they act as regulating norms for meaningful social
exchange (Habermas 1981, vol. 1: 372–377, 412). See further the article by Cooke in this
volume.
3
For information on Wegener and his work, see especially Knobloch (1991); also Juchem (1984,
1986), Knobloch (1988: 292–297), Nerlich (1990: 153–192; 1992: 81–87), Graffi (1991: 87–89),
Elffers (1993), Nerlich and Clarke (1996: 177–183), Morpurgo Davies (1998: 318–320), Grimm-
Vogel (1998), Tenchini (2008).
4
An English translation of Wegener’s 1885 book appeared as part of Abse (1971); note that
Knobloch (1991: xliv) expresses a caveat about details of the translation.
5
In his publication from 1885, Wegener uses the term “logical predicate”; in later works he
switches to “psychological predicate” and “statement” (“Mitteilung”).
6
Knobloch (1991: xvi, xxxii) mentions Lazarus ([1856–1857] 1884) as a possible source of
Wegener’s ideas in this area. About Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), see Knobloch (1988: 268–273,
411–422) and Nerlich and Clarke (1996: 165–168).
7
For details, see Hülzer (1987), Knobloch (1988: 296–297; 1991: xviii-xix), Nerlich (1990:
181–185; 1992: 86–87).
8
This is the opinion also of Knobloch 1988: 297) and Nerlich (1992: 87).
9
See the references to Wegener’s work in Malinowski ([1923] 1946: 297), Gardiner (1932:
passim) and Halliday (1978: 109), particularly in relation to the notion of “situation”.
10
See Ungeheuer (1987, 1990) and Juchem (1984, 1986).
11
For details see Knobloch (1991: xxxix-xli).
12
Quotations from Bühler’s works are referenced, where possible, to both the original German
publications and their English translation, i.e., in the case of the Sprachtheorie, 1934 for the

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German volume, 1990 for its translation.
13
See e.g. Schlieben-Lange (1979: 13); Levinson (1983: 41, 61); Brown and Yule (1983: 1):
Coupland (2007: 12).
14
After the Sprachtheorie (1934), Bühler published several other linguistic articles up until 1938
(Bühler 1935, 1936a, 1936b, 1938). Immediately after the occupation of Vienna by German
troops, Bühler was imprisoned by the Gestapo. His wife and academic collaborator, Charlotte
Bühler, managed to effect his release and to organise their emigration to the USA, but the
continuation of their careers proved difficult: they only gained posts as visiting or assistant
professors and did not return to Europe after the war (see Garvin 1966, Ch. Bühler 1984,
Musolff 1997). The 1960 article “Von den Sinnfunktionen der Sprachgebilde” (Of the Semantic
functions of linguistic structures) is an excerpt from Sprachtheorie and of dubious editorial
status (e.g. it cites the “Organonmodell” as “Organmodell”).
15
Husserl (1900–1901); Wundt (1900); Marty (1908). Bühler reviewed Marty’s work with
specific emphasis on the functional typology, see Bühler (1909a: 964–946).
16
For Bühler’s experiments on sentence comprehension in the context of “Thought Psychology”,
see Bühler (1908), Wundt (1908), Wettersten (1988).
17
For the changes in the “functions”-terminology and the status and ordering of the axioms, see
Wunderlich (1969); Kamp (1977: passim); Beck (1980: 169–192); Busse (1975: 213–215, 222–
229); Camhy (1980a: 92–94); Swiggers (1981: 54–55); Innis (1982: 3–10); Eschbach (1984b:
91–93); Henzler (1987: 354–356); Knobloch (1988: 424–430); Graumann (1988); Musolff
(1990: 26–31); Vonk (1992: passim); Elffers (2005; 2008: 21–24).
18
For the contemporary context of the Saussure-reception in relation to Bühler see Scheerer
(1980: 36–40), Koerner (1984), Musolff (1990: 40–43) and Ehlich (1996).
19
Details of what Bühler had learnt from Wegener can be found in Bühler (1909b: 119–123).
20
See Gardiner (1932: viii).
21
For detailed discussion of these and other pragmatic-functional influences cf. Graumann
(1984), Herrmann (1984), Knobloch and Schallenberger (1993), Musolff (1993) and Nerlich and
Clarke (1996: 182–183, 226–236, 341–343).
22
See Bühler (1933b: 90); in Ströker’s edition (1976: 116–117).
23
See Laziczius (1939); Lohmann (1942–1943); Camhy (1980b); Ortner (1986).
24
For detailed discussion of Grünbaum’s influence on Bühler see Knobloch and Schallenberger
(1993: 85–90).
25
For Bühler’s field-theoretical approach (as opposed to the contemporary notion of “semantic
fields”) cf. Wolf (1932); Heger (1984); Musolff (1990: 61–120); Garvin (1994).
26
For Bühler’s influence on modern pragmatically oriented studies of deixis see Hörmann
(1978: 394–424); Weissenborn (1988); Conte et al. (1989); Innis (1992: 556–557); Ehlich (1996:
959).
27
Garvin (1994: 60–64) interprets the relationship as a superordination of the more general
“surrounding field” over the two subcategories of “symbolic” and “deictic field”; he bases this
reading on an excellent comparison with the contemporary gestalt-psychological theories, which
Bühler himself highlighted (1990: 175–176, 1934: 154–155) as well as with early semiotics
(Charles Morris). However, in the Sprachtheorie this classification is not explicated nor
consistently followed – it constitutes a further theoretical (and highly plausible) development,
the implications of which are still to be worked out in detail.
28
For critical assessments see Klein (1984), Ortner (1983).
29
Living in Vienna at the time, Bühler of course chose an appropriate local variety (einen
schwarzen ‘a black one’).
30
But compare Nerlich and Clarke’s (1996: 236–237) critical comment that Bühler, despite
being one of the most important figures among language researchers engaged in “pragmatics

36
avant la lettre”, “never crossed the last hurdle on his way to a fully developed theory of linguistic
pragmatics”, especially on account of his “[clinging] too much to his three functions of language,
overlooking to some extent the polyfunctionality of speech acts, rediscovered by Wittgenstein”.
31
Toman (1995: 77–79). About Mathesius’s work, see further Trnka ([1946] 1966), Vachek
(1982), Daneš (1987, 2003), Fronek (1988), Graffi (1991: 179–183, 249–250), Toman (1995:
71–86, 97–101 and passim), Leška (1995), Nekula (1999).
32
See Toman (1995: 84–86, 97–101), also Fronek (1988).
33
This notion features in the original title of the Czech article Mathesius ([1939] 1975b); see the
translator’s remark in Mathesius (1975b: 479). It came to be translated as “information-bearing
structure of the sentence”, shortened to “information structure” and alternating with “functional
sentence perspective” (“FSP”).
34
The terminology differs; see Mathesius ([1929] 1983c: 126–128; 1929: 202; 1930: 58). The
term “rheme” came into use only later, through the writings of the Brno scholar of English Jan
Firbas (1921–2000). See the explanation by Vachek in Mathesius (1975a: 185 n71), further
Vachek (1982: 123–124) and Daneš (1987: 23–26; 2003: 40–41).
35
The Prague version of the information structure of the utterance has remained a distinctive
one. See a short description in Hajičová (1994).
36
Jakobson referred to Bühler’s three functions already in 1932 (Jakobson [1932] 1966: 27–28).
In its “Theses” of again some years earlier, the Prague Linguistic Circle had distinguished, under
the heading “On the functions of langugage”, “intellectual speech” from two types of “emotional
speech” and had mentioned the different “hierarchy” of functions for each utterance (Prague
Linguistic Circle [1929] 1983: 88–89). Jakobson probably wrote (part of) this section (nr. 3a) of
the “Theses” (cf. Toman 1995: 289 n13).
37
For the attribution to Jakobson and Mukařovský, see again Toman (1995: 289 n13).
38
See Malinowski ([1923] 1946: 315–316). Cf. Nekula and Ehlers (1996: 190, 192) on the at
first marginal place of the “phatic” function of language in Jakobson’s model.
39
On Jakobson’s model of language functions, see Holenstein (1976: 153–164); Waugh (1976:
25–26); Waugh and Monville-Burston (1990: 15–16); Nekula and Ehlers (1996); Nerlich and
Clarke (1996: 284–286); Waugh and Rudy (1998: 2260–2261).
40
“Conative”: with the notion of “striving” to effect some act by the addressee; cf. Jakobson
([1932] 1966: 22, 27).
41
See Burks (1949). Among the signs having the property of indexicality, Burks views the
“indexical symbol” as the most fundamental type; a “pure” index cannot in effect point to a well-
defined object and is therefore a less fundamental type of sign (Burks 1949: 678-688).
42
Jakobson’s (1971: 132) statement to the effect that Bühler acknowledged the indexical side of
personal pronouns only seems not fully justified. It is when Bühler introduces the indexical field
(Zeigfeld) that he contrasts indexical and appellative words as to the “field” in which,
specifically, their meaning “fulfilment” (Bedeutungspräzision, Bedeutungserfüllung, see above,
2.2) is located: in the indexical field and the symbol-field of an utterance, respectively (Bühler
1990: 91–94; 1934: 78–81). This does not imply that personal pronouns would not have a
symbolic meaning aspect to begin with, such as “the sender of the word in question” (Sender des
aktuellen Wortes) (Bühler 1990: 91; 1934: 78); indeed, the notion of meaning fulfilment
presupposes the opposite idea.
43
Considering the three other possibilities of combining the choices of Code/Message and
referring/referred-to item, Jakobson theorises further in the following way. When the functions
are turned round and it is rather the Message that refers and the Code that is referred to, we have
to do with the elucidation of words and sentences (what would be named the “metalingual”
function of language a few years later); when a Message refers to a Message, the result is the
well-known phenomenon of reported speech; and lastly, with “Code referring to Code” we could

37
describe the general nature of the meaning of proper names, Jakobson holds (Jakobson 1971:
130–131).
44
On Jakobson’s notion of “shifters”, see Holenstein (1976: 158, 162–163); Waugh (1976: 24–
25, 32, 48, 52); Waugh and Monville-Burston (1990: 17–19); Nerlich and Clarke (1996: 282–
284).

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