The need and paradoxes of integral linguistics

Abstract

Coseriu’s idea of an “integral linguistics” needs a thorough reflection because it embraces two different and partly incompatible aims: to counteract the extreme fragmentation of modern linguistic research through philosophical reflection on the true nature of “language”, and to work out some coherent way of approaching linguistic research which avoids its being torn apart by the diversity of the objects constituted by linguists and linguistic schools. No new positive theory of the whole of language might overcome this disintegration. Coseriu‘s efforts to enlarge the scope to include linguistic facts have to be submitted to a radical skeptical reflection on the possibility of such an overall positive theory, based on the real fact that factual speech is not the mere use of any virtual system, but an ongoing creation of sense by individuals, and also that linguistics is itself such “factual speech”: individual, historical, diffuse. Coseriu did not deliver any general theory of language, but the living example of a rich and widely comprehensive individual personality, approaching language from a critical attitude to inherited categories and methods.