Grundformen sprachlicher Weltgestaltung

This paper is concerned with a basic problem of that branch of modern descriptive linguistics known as energetische Sprachbetrachtung. It sets out from the fact that among the mental faculties of man it is the task of lan guage to prepare the way for those perceptual and mental processes which enable hirn to achieve the goals of life. Even historically language must be considered as a constant development of this inherent energy. The aim of linguistic science is to discover how language "grasps" reality and to explain the totality of a language as an intellectual process of world-formation. The first requisite is to determine standards by which the intellectual con tribution can be estimated which each word or each syntactic process makes to this end. A number of approaches already made to this problem seem to have resulted in certain underlying perceptions wh ich could help us to judge the intellectual significance of the concrete coinings of language. These are above all firstly the concept of the directedness of these language-"grasps" (Gerichtetheit der Sprachzugrifje), and secondly the concept of the parti cular fields of "verbalization" (Schauplätze des Wortens). Starting out from their philosophical foundation, these concepts can be extended and em ployed in order to demonstrate the reality-contents of language phenomena.