Translation, introduction and commentary by James McElvenny and Manfred Ringmacher

Abstract

This chapter offers an English translation of ‘Content and Form of Speech’ – one of the core theoretical chapters of Gabelentz's Die Sprachwissenschaft – which addresses the notion of ‘form’ in language and speech, and its opposites, ‘content’ and ‘matter’. ‘Form’ is a key concept in much nineteenth-century linguistic scholarship, which was employed in various senses to a number of different ends, playing a particularly important role in Humboldtian approaches to typology. In this chapter, Gabelentz provides a wide-ranging survey of existing views on ‘form’ in language – including extensive quotations from other authors – and develops his own position. This text is therefore useful not only as a statement of Gabelentz's own thinking, but also as an overview of opinions in the field at the time. The translation is accompanied by a short introduction and notes that contextualize the text and help the present-day reader to follow the historical debates.

Keywords: Wilhelm von Humboldt, H. Steinthal, form, typology, speech act theory

The essence of language consists in pouring the material of the phenomenal world into the form of thoughts. – Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung’.