Language levels

Eugenio Coseriu’s linguistic theory

Abstract

From his very early writings on general linguistics onwards, the Romanian linguist Eugenio Coseriu, like his own contemporary Noam Chomsky and Ferdinand de Saussure before them, delineated the concept of linguistic knowledge. His pursuit of this concept led him to elaborate his famous distinctions of the levels of language, which came to be one of his most important contributions to linguistic theory. In addition to detailing such distinctions, this article discusses the author’s view of the nature, content and structure of linguistic knowledge. It also presents some external and internal circumstances to his theory that could explain the widespread ignorance of Coseriu’s ideas in the realm of contemporary general linguistics, especially in the English-speaking world, before recent claims that Coseriu’s original contributions could have given linguistics a different direction if half a century ago his work had received proper attention. Finally, this paper addresses the question if Coseriu is a neglected genius of twentieth century linguistics as it is frequently argued by his former students and devotees.