Dynamic Structure (Language as an Open System)

This volume is dedicated to the theoretical legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure, which is still challenging not only for linguistics, but for many other disciplines. For Saussure, to conceive language as a system made it possible to found linguistics as an autonomous scientific discipline. However, if language could be seen and treated as a system, it had consequences not only for linguistics, but also for aesthetics, anthropology, or cultural theory. With respect to Czech functional structuralism, as developed by Jan Mukarovsky and others, it seems important that it was in Prague that Saussurean thinking on language came in touch with phenomenological philosophy. Since Husserl's work was already authoritative at the beginning of the 30th, the confrontation of Saussure's theory of language with phenomenological reflections on language was inevitable. The interaction between structuralism and phenomenology then continued, above all, in the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But if the interaction between structuralist theory and phenomenology is in focus of this volume, it is not so much for historical reasons; it is rather due to a mapping of the possible views of language that issue from the confrontation of structuralist and phenomenological tradition of thinking. With regard to language, a high attention is paid to the post-phenomenological and the post-structuralist theories, too.