WEGENER’S LIFE AND WORK
WEGENER’S LIFE AND WORK
Philipp Wegener was born in Neuhaldensleben near Magdeburg on 2 July 1848, and died there on 15 March 1916, in the same year that Bally and Sechehaye published Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Bréal had died the previous year. Thus with Wegener we reach the end of an era.
He studied German philology, philosophy, and comparative linguistics at Marburg and Berlin from 1867 to 1871. Among his teachers were the historian Johann Gustav Droysen, the classicist Ernst Curtius, the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, the general linguist and psychologist of language Heyman Steinthal, and the German scholar Moritz Haupt. He was especially interested in problems of syntax, a topic only sporadically treated in the nineteenth century. He wrote a thesis on Latin syntax De casuum nonnullorum graecorum latinorumque historia (1871), but he was also a keen
Change in language 114
observer of the living languages and dialects (cf. Wegener 1880). As a specialist in this field, he contributed to the Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, edited by Hermann Paul (cf. Wegener 1891).
In his article on German dialectology, written in 1880, he proposed a better distinction between sign (Lautzeichen) and sound (Laut) (1880:453). He also suggested that dialect grammars should be written, consisting of the following sections: phonetics and physiology (Lautlehre), morphology, a logical and psychological study of accents, the influence of written language on spoken language, and a study of the lexicon from a psychological and stylistic point of view. In this last part he wished that dialectologists paid special attention to the different choices of words in different settings, in formal, ordinary, emotional, comic, etc. discourse (1880:472). This article points in the direction of Wegener’s future studies and interests: a psychological and situational analysis of language.
His studies under Steinthal, as well as the reading of Steinthal’s and Paul’s major contributions to linguistics (Steinthal 1871; Paul 1880; cf. Wegener’s review 1882) pushed Wegener even more
But cf. Brugmann’s book on the syntax of the simple Indo-European sentence, published
posthumously in 1925, which shows striking similarities to Wegener’s conception of the sentence, especially in his posthumously published article on the one-word sentence (1921, WS), which had appeared in the issue of the Indogermanische Forschungen that announced Brugmann’s death in 1919.
towards a psychological study of language. In 1885, he finally published his Untersuckungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of the Life of Language) (title of the English transl. Speech and Reason, 1971), a book that hides great treasures. It was based on two lectures given in 1883 and 1884. He intended to publish a sequel to the Investigations, but his duties as a teacher prevented the realization of the ambition (but cf. Wegener 1911, mentioned by Knobloch). His last contribution to the field of general linguistics appeared posthumously in 1921, under the title ‘Der Wortsatz’ (The one-word sentence). Wegener proposes here
a solution to the hotly debated problem of the ‘sentence’. This article too has a particular appeal to the modern linguist, as it contains a detailed analysis of some speech acts (in the Austinean-Searlean sense of this term) in situation, what Wegener himself calls a ‘willkürlicher dialogischer Sprachakt’ (WS: 15)—a voluntary dialogical speech act. In his insistence on dialogue, he shows a more advanced understanding of communication than some modern speech-act theorists.