Eugenio Coseriu

Front matter

DE GRUYTER

Johannes Kabatek

EUGENIO COSERIU

Chapter 1

Coseriu’s epistemological principles and the essence of language —— 6 1.1 Introduction — 6

1.2.1 Scientific objectivity —— 8

1.22 Original knowledge —— 10

1.2.3 Tradition and innovation — 15

1.2.4 Anti-Dogmatism — 17

1.25 The principle of “public usefulness" — 20

1.2.6 A critical view of the principles — 20

1.3.0 Preliminary remarks — 22

1.3.2 The Strasbourg Theses on the essence of language and meaning — 25 1.3.3 A short comment on the ten theses — 30

1.5 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter — 32 1.6 Further reading and works cited in this chapter —— 33 Chapter 2

Norm and correctness — 34

2.2 Coseriu’s conception of norm: background —— 35

24 Linguistic correction —— 44

2.6 Reception —— 52

2.8 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter —— 55 2.9 Further reading and works cited in this chapter —— 56

X — Contents

Chapter 3 On proper names, pragmatics and text linguistics — 59

3.3 Determination and ‘surrounding fields’ —— 67

3.4 Text linguistics —— 74

35 Translation theory — 76

3.8 Further reading and works cited in this chapter —— 83 Chapter 4

Language change — 85

4.2 Language Change before Sincronia, diacronía e historia — 88 43 Sincronia, diacronia e historia —— 91

4.4 Further developments I: Sincronía, diacronía y tipología —— 97 4.5 Further developments II: Linguistic change does not exist —— 98 4.6 Coseriu's criticism of the invisible hand — 99

4.9 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 102 Chapter 5

Varieties and variational linguistics —— 104

5.2 Coseriu, Flydal and the “three dimensions of variation" — 104 5.3 Diasystem and structural dialectology: Coseriu and Weinreich —— 113 5.4 Coseriu, Koch and Oesterreicher —— 116

5.7 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 123 Chapter 6

Structuralism —— 125

6.2 The general principles of Structuralism —— 128

6.5 Structural semantics — 140

Contents

6.6 Semantics beyond Structuralism: Skeology — 144

6.7 Structural syntax — 146

6.9 Final remarks — 152

6.10 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter — 153 6.11 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 155

Chapter 7

‘Tradition and innovation’: the History of Linguistics —— 157

7.2 Individual studies on the history of (Romance) linguistics — 160 7.3 The history of Romance linguistics — 164

74 Lingua et traditio — 169

Chapter 8

Philosophy of Language — 175

8.2 Coseriu: a philosopher — 175

8.4 Analytic philosophy —— 188

8.5 Coseriu's philosophy of language — 191

8.6 Criticism and outlook — 194

8.7 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter —— 195 8.8 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 196

Chapter 9 Romance languages and linguistic typology — 198 9.1 Romance languages and linguistics —— 198

9.2 Language typology — 202

9.3 Humboldt and language typology —— 203

9.4 Examples of typological analysis —— 207

9.6 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter — 211 9.7 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 213

— XI

XII —— Contents

Chapter 10

Coseriu and Chomsky — 215

10.2 Coseriu and the “new guy” — 216

10.3 ‘Achievements and limitations of Transformational Grammar’ —— 220 10.4 No continuation —— 223

10.5 Chomsky and tradition —— 225

Chapter 11

Aesthetics — 232

11.3 Montevideo and ‘The problem of art’ — 242

11.4 Language and poetry - and literature in general — 250 11.5 Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter —— 251 11.6 Further reading and works cited in this chapter — 252

Chapter 12 Epilogue — 253 12.1 A few personal remarks to conclude... —— 253

12.2 . Works by Eugenio Coseriu cited in this chapter — 268 12.3 Further reading and works cited in this chapter —— 268

Chapter 13 Biographical data —— 269

Chapter 14

References — 270

Preliminary remarks

Eugenio Coseriu (1921-2002) is considered to be one of the most important linguistic scholars of the second half of the 20th century. He is known mainly as a structuralist and a Romance linguist, but his work goes far beyond this, offering a comprehensive linguistic theory, with writings covering a wide range of research fields, from semantics, syntax, typology, variational linguistics, language change, pragmatics, and text linguistics, to empirical fields such as Vulgar Latin, the history of the philosophy of language, and the history of Romance linguistics. His thought is founded on solid philosophical grounds, and throughout his life he came into contact with a number of different academic traditions and cultures. However, for a variety of reasons (among which, the dominant languages in which he published: Spanish, Italian, French, and German), knowledge of Coseriu’s thought is rather marginal in the Anglo-American world. He is sometimes mentioned in a very general way by name or as a reference to “one of these European structuralists”, or is cited because of some particular contribution a particular subject, or because certain terms that he coined (such as the threefold distinction between diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic varieties) have entered into the linguistic canon. But it is difficult to find a broad and full expression of the Coserian universe, and this is essentially because most of his work remains unavailable in English translation, as well as due to the absence of a general introduction to his work’.

This book aims to fill this gap by offering an overview of his main contributions to linguistics (and to other disciplines), as well as tracing the main periods of his life. The title derives from the aim to show that Coseriu’s thought, even if linked to and based on the systemic study of language structure, goes far beyond structuralism, and illustrates both the achievements and the limitations of structural analysis. The title is not new, having been used by Coseriu himself, and appearing in several publications in German, Spanish and Romanian’. The decision

1 It should be noted that in 2021, the centenary of Coseriu’s birth, De Gruyter published (in English) the collective volume Eugenio Coseriu. Past, present and future, edited by Klaas Willems and Cristinel Munteanu, which contains a list of publications by Coseriu available in English (p. 37-39). 2 Coseriu himself had announced two volumes of collected papers under the title Más allá del estructuralismo, ‘Beyond structuralism', by the Madrid publisher Gredos. In 1982, he published a paper in French with the title *Au-delà du structuralisme", in: Moll Marqués, Aina (ed.): XVI Congrés Internacional de Lingüística [i] Filologia Romaniques (Palma de Mallorca 7.— 12.04.1980), Actes, I, Sessions plenaries i taules rodones, Palma de Mallorca: Moll, 163—168. In 2002, he participated with two contributions on Humboldt to a collective volume edited by Kennosuke Ezawa, Wilfried Kúrschner, Karl H. Rensch and Manfred Ringmacher: Linguistik jenseits des Strukturalismus, ‘Linguistics beyond structuralism’. In 2019, we launched a project at the University of Zurich funded by a Open Access. O 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716573-002

XIV —— Preliminary remarks to use it for this book is due to the fact that it encapsulates in two words that idea that there is much more to discover in Coseriu's oeuvre than just a particular branch of European structuralism.

As the author of this book, I will not be able to offer a completely neutral view: as a student at Tübingen University in the 1980s, and due to a close relationship with Coseriu until his death, I was very strongly influenced by the man and his thought, and part of my own linguistic work is based on Coseriu's theory or on the further development of it. This obviously creates a bias, but it also has the advantage of drawing on intense and protracted personal knowledge, plus access to a vast amount of information. Apart from several years of study as one of Coseriu's final disciples, this includes years of intensive and in some periods daily contact with Coseriu, frequent trips to conferences, innumerable hours of conversation, in addition to the experience, over two summers, of intensive interviews with Coseriu about his life and work (published in collaboration with Adolfo Murguía in 19975); before he died, he asked me to assume the responsibility for his legacy, and in 2005 the Coseriu Archive at the University of Tübingen was inaugurated. I have also contributed to his legacy by providing access to digitised information on the site www.coseriu.com / www.coseriu.ch, as well as directing or co-directing research projects on his work, founding the online-journal Energeia in 2009, organising or co-organising several events on Coseriu's linguistics and, finally, through numerous publications that include reflections on Coseriu's thought, plus editions of, and comments on, his unpublished work’.

the Swiss National Science Foundation with the aim of publishing Coseriu’s correspondence: Uber den Strukturalismus hinaus“ — Briefe an Eugenio Coseriu und die Geschichte der Linguistik im 20. Jahrhundert, ‘Beyond structuralism. Letters to Eugenio Coseriu and the history of linguistics in the 20th century’. Within the project, several publications under this general title appeared in Romania (among others: Kabatek, Johannes/Bleortu, Cristina (2019): *Dincolo de structuralism. Scrisori către Eugeniu Coseriu si istoria lingvisticii in secolul al XX-lea”, Limba română (Chisinau) 4/254, 45-49; Kabatek, Johannes/Bleortu, Cristina (2021): Dincolo de structuralism. Scrisori către Eugeniu Coseriu si historia lingvisticii in seculol al xx-lea. Corespondenta Marius Sala — Eugenio Coseriu, Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Romane; Kabatek, Johannes/Bleortu, Cristina (2021): “Dincolo de structuralism. Scrisori cátre Eugeniu Coseriu si istoria lingvisticii in secolul al XX-lea" (IIT), Limba română 1, 54-56; Kabatek, Johannes/Bleortu, Cristina (2021): “Dincolo de structuralism. Scrisori cátre Eugeniu Coseriu si istoria lingvisticii in secolul al XX-lea” (IV), Limba romänä 2, 60 — 63; Kabatek, Johannes/Bleortu, Cristina (2021): *Dincolo de structuralism. Scrisori cátre Eugeniu Coseriu si istoria lingvisticii in secolul al XX-lea" (V), Limba romana 4, 55-62).

3 Kabatek, Johannes/Murguia, Adolfo: “Die Sachen sagen, wie sie sind...”. Eugenio Coseriu im Gespräch, Tübingen: Narr 1997 (= DSs).

4 Two years after Coseriu’s death, in 2004, I moved to Tübingen to occupy the chair of Romance linguistics (“Coseriu’s chair”) that had remained vacant after his successor Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (1943-2000) had passed away so early. At that time, I established the Coseriu Archive, whereby the

Preliminary remarks — XV

I hope that this book will contribute to a wider and more general knowledge of Eugenio Coseriu’s oeuvre and that it will serve as an invitation to read his texts. Coseriu’s body of work is a “classic”; it offers a coherent and profound view on language which should not only be considered a monumental achievement in the history of linguistics, but is also surprisingly relevant and challenging in the context of current linguistic research and thought.

published works were digitised and made available on the internet. More recently, much more content was added in a project at the University of Zurich (see www.coseriu.ch), and manuscripts were made accessible through a project at the University Library of Tübingen (http:/idb.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/digitue/regio/coseriu_archiv) on the initiative of my successor at Tübingen, Prof. Wiltrud Mihatsch. For further details on the personal history of these projects, see chapter 12.

List of abbreviations

Coseriu’s works are cited in brackets followed by the year of publication [xxx] (xxxx) e. g. [11] (1953), and are organised according to the numbers in the list of ref erences at the end of this book (see chapter 14.1); the numbers in that list are also identical to those to be found at www.coseriu.com/www.coseriu.ch (where most of the work can be freely accessed and downloaded). Letters are quoted with the letter ID of the project DiLeCos (Digitized Letters to Coseriu, www.coseriu.ch). Manuscripts from the Coseriu Archive at Tübingen are quoted with the manuscript number and the indication ArCos (http://idb.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/digitue/regio/coseriu archiv). Further abbreviations:

CLG = Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916/1984): Cours de Linguistique Générale, édition critique préparée par Tullio de Mauro, (1st edition 1972, on the basis of the original version by Bally, Sechehaye and Riedlinger, Lausanne/Paris 1916) Paris: Payot.

DSs 7 Kabatek, Johannes/Murguía, Adolfo (1997): *Die Sachen sagen, wie sie sind...". Eugenio Coseriu im Gesprüch, Tübingen: Narr.

Energeia = Energeia. Online Journal for Linguistics, Language Philosophy and History of Linguistics, www.energeia-online.org

ENERGON - Albrecht, Jórn/Lüdtke, Jens/Thun, Harald (eds.) (1988): Energeia und Ergon. Studia in Honorem Eugenio Coseriu, 3 vols., Tübingen: Narr.

SDH 7 Coseriu, Eugenio (1958): Sincronía, diacronía e historia. El problema del cambio lingüístico, Montevideo: Universidad de la Repüblica.

SNH 7 Coseriu, Eugenio (1952): Sistema, norma y habla, Montevideo: Universidad de la Repübli-

Ca.

Citations are generally reproduced in English (my translations) in the text in single quotes, with original versions in footnotes. Double quotes indicate that the text is reproduced in the original language.

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Introduction

This is the first comprehensive monograph on Eugenio Coseriu. Its aim is to serve as an introduction to the vast Coserian oeuvre, an overview that will offer, chapter by chapter, basic insights into his work and thought. This is not an easy task: we live in a world of experts, and due to today’s high degree of disciplinary specialisation, no linguist in the 21st century is likely to have a thorough grasp of all the fields in which Coseriu was active throughout his life. The general programme of what he himself used to call “Integral Linguistics” from the 1980s onwards is not only extremely ambitious, but is also something to which Coseriu himself contributed from a wide variety of scholarly fields. Not only did he work within a number of areas of general and Romance linguistics, he was also an expert on the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, as well as on the theory of aesthetics. To produce an adequate and satisfying monograph on the whole range of Coseriu’s thinking would ideally presuppose expert knowledge in all these areas, something beyond the reach of a single author, and thus in what follows it is possible that scholars from one or another specific field might feel that their own area of expertise has not been dealt with in the kind of depth which ideally they would like. This may be the reason why such a work has never been attempted before. Be that as it may, it was on the centenary of Coseriu’s birth that I was reminded that such an endeavour was indeed necessary, and I felt it almost a duty to write this overview I apologise, however, for any shortcomings herein; I am perfectly aware that each of the chapters is imperfect, and that much more could be said. On the other hand, a compact overview also has advantages, and the aims of this book will have been fulfilled if it contributes to the knowledge of Coseriu’s thought and makes the reader curious to explore Coseriu’s own texts; from personal experience I know that reading him can be enormously enriching. Perhaps this is also the right moment to look at his work afresh. The Japanese linguist Takashi Kamei, in comparing the reception of Coseriu’s writings with those of Saussure and Jakobson and observing that a true reception only comes after a certain time, claimed that Coseriu would in fact become “a linguist of the 21st century”.

Coseriu's life is marked by different places — Romania, Italy, Uruguay, Portugal, and finally, Germany (besides Spain, France and other countries) — and languages — Romanian, Italian, Spanish and German (besides Portuguese, French, the Slavic languages, Japanese...). He was a polyglot linguist who lived in different languages and felt the diversity of language structures and linguistic culture from the inside. He conceived of universality from a particular view, or better said, from a combination of several particular views. His linguistic biography and his interest in languages, not only as objects of research but as part of his own practical experience, a Open Access. O 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716573-004 strongly contributed to his theoretical views, and even if his biographical background may not directly or straightforwardly explain his language theory, it may help us to understand some of his conceptions.

Eugenio Coseriu (Eugeniu or Eugen Coseriu, in the original spelling) was born on July 27th, 1921, in Miháileni, a village in Bessarabia, within the Romanian-speaking lands north of the Black Sea between the rivers Prut and Dniester. It was part of Romania when he was born, but is now part of the Republic of Moldova. Mihaileni itself sits close to the small town of Balti, where he attended high school, following primary school in his home village. His father was a public sanitary agent and his mother organised the household: a lower-middle-class background, not particularly intellectual, although his father had studied at a Russian high school and used to talk to his son about the classics of Russian literature. Eugeniu was talented and in his youth he would write poems and short stories, some of which were published by the Romanian literature historian Cálinescu (who saw in Coseriu a literary talent) in his Jornalul Literar. After completing high school in 1939, he moved to Iasi and studied law, plus French and Romanian philology; in 1940, after being involved in fascism, he was awarded a grant and left to continue his studies in Rome. It was here that he developed a growing fascination for language diversity and for philosophy; he also came into contact with Croce's aesthetics and the linguistic thought of Antonino Pagliaro. Both led him to Humboldt and thus to acquiring the historical foundations for a cultural conception of language and linguistics. He completed his studies with a thesis directed by Giovanni Maver on language and folklore in Bessarabia, the region where he had grown up, before beginning studies in philosophy, first in Padua, and then in Milan. Apart from his ongoing studies in philosophy and in Slavic and Romance linguistics, he became part of the Sodalizio Glottologico Milanese, founded in 1947 by Vittore Pisani, his later father-in-law, a linguistic circle organised along the same lines as others that existed in different places at the time. In the journal of the Sodalizio he published his first linguistic studies. In 1949, he submitted his second thesis, on The Evolution of Aesthetic Ideas in Romania, this strongly influenced by his supervisor Antonio Banfi, being essentially a Marxist approach to Romania's *new aesthetics" (see chapter 11). In parallel with his studies, Coseriu worked as an author for an encyclopaedia, translated texts, and wrote literary and art criticism, among other things. But he aimed to become a university professor and he achieved this by moving to another country: Uruguay. This destination was just one option among several, but Coseriu's wife was Uruguayan and he was attracted by the possibilities of a wealthy country far away from a Europe decimated and divided by the Second World War and far away from communist Romania.

His years in Uruguay would be enormously productive and creative. Coseriu began work at a university without a specialised library and without a real tradition in linguistics. Perhaps the challenge of having to build everything almost from nothing shaped his linguistic and intellectual personality more than would have been the case had he found himself in a more comfortable and traditional academic environment. In any case, the Montevideo years are absolutely remarkable: it is here that Coseriu's theory of language, which had probably taken shape to a greater or lesser extent during his years in Italy, was explicitly formulated. It is where the basic concepts were defined, and where some of his most notable studies were written: Sistema, norma y habla, Sincronía, diacronía e historia, Determinación y entorno, La geografía lingüística, apart from the monumental unpublished manuscripts on language correctness (see chapter 2) and on the theory of proper names (see chapter 3). Due to his personal circumstances at the time, all these works were written in Spanish, and of course the reception of his oeuvre was, and remains, strongly determined by the languages in which it was, and is still, available.

In far-away Montevideo, Coseriu created a fruitful atmosphere of collaboration, establishing international contacts and sending his own work and that of his group to linguists around the world (see chapter 2.6). This is how the Montevideo school became rather well-known, not only in Latin America, but indeed far further afield.

But from 1957 onwards, when he met linguists from many parts of the world at the International Conference of Linguists in Oslo, his orientation was tending towards Europe once more, and indeed he would go on to establish more and more contacts with European linguists. In 1960, he visited Portugal for several months and then, in 1961, the Western German University of Bonn, through an invitation by the Romance studies scholar Harri Meier. Finally, in 1963, after spending another year in Bonn and Frankfurt, he was appointed as full professor in Tübingen, where he remained until his death in 2002. In Tübingen he further developed his theory, and it is during these years that his influence on Romance linguistics in Germany and in Europe began to be felt in earnest. His main works were re-published in Spain, and subsequently in Germany and other countries. Several contributions written in the 1960s, including some of his most significant writing on structural semantics, were originally written in French. From the 1970s onwards, the Tübingen school became the most influential centre of Romance linguistics in Germany, and Coseriu not only continued to develop his programme of structuralist linguistics, but also addressed systematically what he called the *universal level" of *language in general" as well as the *individual level", the level of text. He wrote about Vulgar Latin (one of his favourite fields), about text linguistics, he attacked Generative Grammar, and he produced many detailed studies on specific issues in general and Romance linguistics, as well as on the history of linguistics and language philosophy.

During his final years, the international nature of his career was recognised with numerous academic distinctions, among them dozens of honorary doctorates from universities around the world. When he passed away, a research project in Tubingen was already at work classifying his unpublished manuscripts, and three years after his death, the Coseriu Archive at Tubingen University was established as a place of research. An international biennial conference, held in different locations, now discusses his work; monographs and journal papers are dedicated to his theory; and new, previously unpublished texts are progressively being made available to the public. Coseriu’s influence on a variety of different fields is still very strong, but varies greatly, from complete absence to an almost monopolistic presence, depending on the disciplines in question, on schools, and on countries. There are still those with an almost blind admiration for Coseriu’s work, who claim that he saw almost everything, and that outside the limits of his thought there is nothing worthy of our attention in linguistics, an attitude that Coseriu himself would have rejected. There are others who just as firmly believe that looking at the outdated linguistics of the 20th century is a waste of time. This book is addressed to a third group, those who share the idea (defended by Coseriu himself) of “Lingua et Traditio” (see the following chapter and chapter 7): in the history of linguistics as a cultural science, we find many ideas which remain relevant; we must of course have a critical view of the traditions of scholarship and consider older views in the context of newer ones. But we should also look with respect at a coherent body of thought which was conceived of and built by Coseriu during his life, and I hope this book will contribute to bringing this thought a little bit closer to an interested readership.

The book is not a biography. The chapters might refer to biographical details every now and then, when these seem important in explaining Coseriu’s intellectual and academic evolution. The aim, however, is not to explore his personal life per se. The opening chapters of the book of interviews DSs mentioned above are based chronologically on the places where he lived, and for those interested in biographical details, I recommend reading these. In addition, a short biographical chronology can be found at the end of the current book (chapter 13).

The chapters in this volume are thematic and more or less independent; however, they reflect, at least partly, a certain chronology in Coseriu’s thinking, and the later chapters sometimes make reference to previous ones, so in this sense a linear reading is preferable. I have decided to place the chapter on aesthetics at the end, even though it deals with an issue that was central in Coseriu’s work prior to his systematic construction of a linguistic theory, because Coseriu is far better known as a linguist than as a theorist on aesthetics. This of course does not mean that his writings on aesthetics are less important, and I believe that there is much of Coseriu still to be discovered in this respect.

Each chapter ends with a list of some of Coseriu’s works on the subject dealt with in that chapter, as well as details of the titles cited therein and some suggestions for further readings. A complete bibliography of Coseriu’s work, plus works on Coseriu, can be found at the end of the book, as well as an index of names.

Chapter 1 Coseriu’s epistemological principles and the essence of language

There are different possible ways to approach Coseriu’s oeuvre, and probably the best recommendation for getting to know how he worked and thought is by accessing his own writing. But those who do not know Coseriu might ask: where should I start? Which of his contributions to linguistics or to the philosophy of language are the most important and still worth reading? The answer depends on individual preferences and on one’s own repertoire of languages, since much of his work is only available in Spanish, Italian, French, German or Romanian. Another way of understanding Coseriu is by reading his own reflections on his life’s work, especially the extensive book of interviews Die Sachen sagen, wie sie sind (DSs), available in German, Romanian and Spanish, and to which I will refer repeatedly. In the present book, I have decided to take a different approach, starting from Coseriu’s own epistemological principles, since these underly his whole scientific activity and will allow us to explain, at least in part, why his oeuvre is so vast and yet so coherent. As we will see in the following chapters, what characterises Coseriu and lends him enduring significance, perhaps more than any of his specific contributions to linguistics, is a critical view on linguistics (and on science in general); a kind of a meta-view that has had a notable impact on his disciples and continues to influence his readers. Reading Coseriu has two important effects: it makes readers feel that they understand the issues under discussion, and perhaps also (sometimes erroneously) that they know more about it than is generally known. Coseriu has a very clear style and a very convincing way of argumentation which helps to orientate the reader; this orientation is valid not only for a particular issue at hand, but goes far beyond, in that it locates that issue within a broader epistemological context. The basic requirement of a scientist — and this essentially holds for all fields - is to be critically conscious of one's own activity without getting lost in the vast universe of facts. This *meta-thought" not only needs an exhaustive background, but also conviction and stability, and during the final decades of his life Coseriu continually emphasised the steadiness of his conceptions. On several occasions, he argued that his basic linguistic thought had already been conceived in the 1950s and that the remainder of his life was dedicated to the *elaboration" of an already intuitively existing framework of thought. Asked about any changes of mind over the course of his life, Coseriu stated in 1996:

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‘I would not see such changes of mind. Immodest as I am, I use to compare myself with Hegel and to say that in the way that all of Hegel, the whole Hegelian system, is already given in the Jenaer Realphilosophie and that all the rest is just an elaboration of it, also in my case the whole system was already there in a nutshell from the beginning. I may admit partially that it was not sufficiently reasoned or that it did not undergo sufficient elaboration, but I stand by everything because it was actually not a development, but, if development, then only in the sense of an unfolding and not in the sense of a “stupid evolution”, where one moves to something else and says that what was valid before no longer applies. I have always been convinced that what I described corresponded to a certain side of the reality of language. Everything was already there in the draft, and one could already imagine how this or that would be realized afterwards.’ (DSs, 139)"

This “elaboration” or “unfolding” does not happen in a completely linear way. Rather, we can identify periods in Coseriu’s life that are marked by different focal points and languages:

- the Italian period (1940s): publications in Italian about aesthetics and art criticism; literary publications,

- the Montevideo period (1950s): texts in Spanish; central issues in different linguistic fields; elaboration and criticism of basic concepts of Saussurean thought,

- the first German period (1960s, Frankfurt and the early Tübingen years): publications in French about language typology and structural semantics; first teaching in German,

- the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s: blossoming of the Tübingen school, teaching in German with publications emerging from teaching activities; philosophy of language, current linguistic theories (generativism, sociolinguistics), history of Romance linguistics,

1 “Ich würde keine solchen Brüche sehen. In meiner Unbescheidenheit pflege ich mich mit Hegel zu vergleichen und zu sagen, daß so, wie der ‘ganze Hegel’, das ganze Hegelsche System, bereits in der Jenenser Realphilosophie gegeben und alles weitere nur Entfaltung davon ist, auch in meinem Fall das System schon von Anfang an im Keim da war. Ich kann teilweise zugeben, dafs es nicht genug fundiert oder entfaltet wurde, aber ich stehe zu allem, weil es eigentlich keine Entwicklung war, sondern, wenn Entwicklung, dann nur im Sinne von Entfaltung und nicht im Sinne der *dummen Evolution’, wo man zu etwas anderem übergeht und sagt, daß das Vorherige jetzt nicht mehr gilt. Ich war immer schon überzeugt, daí das, was ich beschrieben habe, einer bestimmten Seite der Realitát von Sprache entsprach. Es war alles im Entwurf bereits da, und man konnte schon sehen, wie dies oder jenes dann gemacht werden würde". The sideswipe at Noam Chomsky is made explicit in the subsequent text, when Coseriu says: ‘For example, a linguist who abandons or even denies the things is Chomsky’ (“Ein Linguist, der die Sachen verläßt und auch leugnet, ist zum Beispiel Chomsky"), see chapter 10.