Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

Book | Chapter

142037

The schema of language functions

Robert Innis

pp. 147-164

Abstract

In Plato’s commonsense saying that we have already cited, that language is an organum for one person’s communicating with another about things, three fundamental relations are enumerated: one person communicating—another person being communicated to—the things being communicated. Let us draw a schema on a piece of paper, three points grouped together as a triangle, and a fourth point put in the middle, and let us begin to reflect on what this schema is able to symbolize (see Figure 1). The fourth point lying in the middle stands for that to-be-investigated organum, which clearly must stand in some relation to the three foundations in the corners, whether the relation be a direct or a mediate one. We draw dotted lines from the center to the corner points of our schema and consider what these dotted lines symbolize.

Publication details

Published in:

Innis Robert (1982) Karl Bühler: semiotic foundations of language theory. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 147-164

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4757-0923-0_11

Full citation:

Innis Robert (1982) The schema of language functions, In: Karl Bühler, Dordrecht, Springer, 147–164.