Entry in: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, Chris

Bulcaen (eds.). Handbook of Pragmatics. (Installment 1997)

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1-15

Andreas Musolff

Bühler, Karl

1. Intellectual biography

Karl Bühler was born in Meckesheim (south-west Germany) in 1879. He studied

philosophy and medicine in Freiburg, gaining doctorates in both subjects. In 1905, he
became an assistant to the psychologist Oswald Külpe in Würzburg, head of the
‘Würzburg School’ of Denkpsychologie (‘Thought Psychology’), which had started to
diverge from the mainstream associationist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt by advancing
a ‘critical realism’. The publication of Bühler’s Habilitationsschrift on Tatsachen und
Probleme zu einer Psychologie der Denkvorgänge (‘Facts and problems for a Psychology
of Thought Processes’, 1907-8), which investigated cognitive processes by way of
introspectionist experiments, led to open dispute between Bühler and Wundt (further on
the debate cf. Knobloch 1988b: 315-317, 453-460, Ungeheuer 1984: 13-21, Vonk 1992:
116-133, 1996). When Külpe moved to Bonn and later to Munich, Bühler followed him,
concentrating on studies of spatial/temporal Gestalt perception as well as on problems of
developmental psychology and language psychology. In 1918, now Professor at the
Technical University at Dresden, Bühler published a monograph on Die Geistige
Entwicklung des Kindes (‘The Cognitive Development of the Child’, 1918a), which
became a classic of developmental psychology. In the same year, the essay Kritische
Musterung der neuern Theorien des Satzes (‘Critical assessment of new sentence
theories’, 1918b) appeared, in which Bühler discussed Edmund Husserl’s, Anton Marty’s
and Wundt’s theories of meaning. As an attempt to overcome the imbalance between
these three positions (which he regarded as each valid in themselves but one-sided),

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Bühler proposed a tripartite model of language functions which he called: Kundgabe:
‘indication of the speaker’s feelings and attitudes’, Auslösung: ‘influencing listeners’
reactions’, and Darstellung: ‘representation’ (of objects and state of affairs). Bühler,
since 1922 Professor of Psychology at the University of Vienna, went on to develop this
model further in a series of major studies. These include his 1927 book Die Krise der
Psychologie (‘The Crisis of Psychology’), in which the concept of communicative
functions is used as the basis for a critical assessment of contemporary psychology, and a
volume on Ausdruckstheorie (‘Theory of expression’, 1933a) that focuses on
psychological and biological aspects of miming and gesture. Of greatest interest for
linguistics, and especially for linguistic pragmatics are the essays Das Ganze der
Sprachtheorie, ihr Aufbau und ihre Teile (‘The whole of language theory, its system and
its parts’, 1932), Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften (‘Axiomatics of the language
sciences’, 1933b; partial English translation in Innis 1982: 91-164), and his linguistic
opus magnum: Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, published in 1934
(translated into English in 1990: Theory of Language. The Representational Function of
Language, quoted from here on as Bühler 1990).
By the early 1930s, Karl Bühler and his wife Charlotte (who was also a former
student of Külpe and lead educational research at the Vienna Psychological Institute,
which was linked to both Karl Bühler’s University chair and the municipal Education
Department) had achieved prominence in international psychology, attracting students
and researchers from abroad, and lecturing widely in Europe and in the USA. Karl Bühler
contributed to the discussions of the Prague Linguistic Circle about the definition of the
linguistic sign and the psychological aspects of the phonetics-phonology distinction
(Bühler 1931 and 1936). He acted as Director of an institute for social and economic
psychology that pioneered research on the effects on long-time unemployment (cf.
Lazarsfeld 1959). However, with the advent of the authoritarian Dollfuß regime in
Austria and of National Socialism in Germany, socially committed research initiatives
came increasingly under pressure (cf. Ash 1988: 315-318). In 1933, after the expulsion of
its Jewish members, Bühler resigned as president of the German Psychological Society.
In 1937, with the threat of Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany looming, Karl and
Charlotte accepted professorships at Fordham University in New York. These offers

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were, however, withdrawn at the start of 1938; just before German troops entered
Austria. Soon afterwards, Karl Bühler — as an exponent of progressive educationalist
and scientific movements — was arrested by the GESTAPO and held in custody for six
weeks. His wife, who at the time was on a lecture tour in Norway, managed to effect his
release and organized their emigration to the USA. After holding posts as visiting
professors at various universities and colleges up until 1945, the Bühlers moved to Los
Angeles, where they became Assistant Professors at Medical Schools. Whilst Charlotte
started a new career as a psychotherapist, Karl resumed his interests in Gestalt studies
and their application to animal psychology. He published several articles on these topics
as well as a book Das Gestaltprinzip im Leben der Menschen und der Tiere (‘The Gestalt
Principle in the lives of Men and Animals’, 1960). He died in Los Angeles in 1963. His
scientific estate was scattered at the time of his arrest and during the emigration. Those
parts that were handed back to the University of Vienna by Charlotte Bühler after his
death are now stored in the documentation centre of the Forschungsstelle und
Dokumentationszentrum für Österreichische Philosophie (FDÖP) in Graz, Austria;
copies and parts of the estate are also kept at the Max-Planck-Institute for
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands (for information on the estate cf. Camhy
1980: 118-164; Eschbach 1990: XXVIII, Lebzeltern 1969, Vonk 1992: 273-300, 312-314
and the FDÖP’s Internet portal: "http://www.austrian-philosophy.at/inhalt.html").

2. Language as a ‘tool’: the “organon-model” of language functions

In linguistics, Bühler is most often remembered for his three-sided model of language as
a means of communication, called the ‘organon-model’ (from Greek organon: ‘tool’). He
presented it under this label in the Axiomatik essay of 1933 and in the Sprachtheorie, but
it had been pre-formulated as a concept of three basic functional dimensions of language
as early as 1918, in his article on sentence-theory. In his following publications, the
model gained further semiotic and evolutionary aspects. In Die Krise der Psychologie it
served to distinguish the fundamental sign functions of ‘index’ and ‘appeal’, which are
already present in animal communication, from representations, which are characteristic

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for human social communication and help to adapt the first two functions to that level
(Bühler 1927: 50-51). On this basis, Bühler develops the ‘organon-model’ into an over-
arching, integrative model of the essential objects of psychological research: ‘subjective
experience’, social ‘behaviour’ and ‘structures of objective sense’ (1927: 29, 57-62).
It was also in Die Krise der Psychologie that Bühler used the term ‘axiom’ to
characterize the epistemological status of his three-functions model, but it was not until
the early 1930s that he incorporated it into a set of axioms of linguistics. He now called
the three functions: Ausdruck: ‘expression’ of the speaker’s feelings and attitudes, Appell:
‘appeal’ to the listener, and Darstellung: ‘representation’ (Bühler 1932: 106; 1933a: 74-
90). In the Sprachtheorie, the organon-model occupies the first place among four axioms
and it states that each linguistic sign is determined by a threefold relationship to its
‘fundaments’: “It is a symbol by virtue of its co-ordination to objects and states of affairs,
a symptom (Anzeichen, indicium: index) by virtue of its dependence on the sender, whose
inner state it expresses, and a signal by virtue of its appeal to the hearer, whose inner and
outer behaviour it directs as do other communicative signs” (Bühler 1990: 35; comp.
1934: 28). The other three axioms are, in the order of the Sprachtheorie: (B) ‘the
significative nature of language’; (C) ‘speech action and language work, speech act and
language structure’; (D) ‘word and sentence: the S[ymbol]-F[ield]-system of the type
language’ (Bühler 1990: 40-90; for the significance of these further axioms for
pragmatics cf. below).
One major difference between the post-1931 versions of the organon-model and
Bühler’s previous concepts of language functions is the influence of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (German translation published in 1931). In the
introductory chapter of the Sprachtheorie as well as in the discussion of axioms, Bühler
gives careful consideration to Saussure’s definition of the sign and the langue – parole
distinction. He criticizes Saussure’s presentation of the ‘speech circuit’ as a relapse into
outdated ‘psycho-physics’ and he insists that language comprises different types of signs
(1934: 25-28, 34-37; 1990: 31-34, 42-43). When discussing the distinction of a
linguistique de la langue from a linguistique de la parole, he puts the emphasis not so
much on the ‘structuralist’ Saussure endorsing the scientific investigation of the langue-
aspect, but instead praises the Swiss linguist for having shown “what would have to be

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discovered in order to be really able to initiate a ‘linguistique de la parole’” (1990: 8). In
line with this unorthodox evaluation of Saussure, Bühler cites three communicatively
oriented theorists as authorities in support of the organon-model: Philipp Wegener, Karl
Brugmann and Alan H. Gardiner. Bühler acknowledges their influence in the introduction
to the axioms, presenting their communicative perspective as the necessary “complement
to the old grammar” (1990: 27). From Wegener’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen
des Sprachlebens (‘Investigations into the fundamental questions of the use of language’,
1885), Bühler had learned about the social action-dimension of speech and about the
listener’s role in it. Brugmann’s essay on Indo-European pronoun systems (1904) had
provided him with an account of demonstrative deixis governing the primary speech
situation. Gardiner’s Theory of Speech and Language (itself dedicated to the memory of
Wegener) not only owed its publication, in 1932, partly to Bühler’s encouragement for
Gardiner (proffered on the occasion of Bühler’s visit to London in 1931), but received
praise from Bühler as the “most interesting attempt, in which a similar project [to
Bühler’s own one] is consistently carried out”, albeit with the reservation that Gardiner
strove for a “situational theory of language”, whereas Bühler himself wanted to account
also for types of language use that were ‘removed from the situation’ (Bühler 1990: 28;
for discussion of these and other influences cf. Knobloch & Schallenberger 1993,
Musolff 1993 and Nerlich & Clarke 1996: 182-183, 226-236, 341-343, Wunderlich
1969).
Because of the complex epistemological and methodological relationships
between its three functional dimensions, the organon-model was later criticized as being
heterogeneous; furthermore, its characterization as an axiom does not match the
mathematical sense of that term (for its reception cf. Beck 1980: 164-192, Busse 1975:
222-229; Graumann 1988, Kamp 1977, Knobloch 1988a: 424-430). To be fair to Bühler,
it must be pointed out that the Sprachtheorie — as its subtitle: Die Darstellungsfunktion
der Sprache indicates — concentrates on the representational function and thus covers
only part of the theoretical horizon of the organon-model. Despite the criticism, the
model has proved its enduring value as a powerful stimulus for debate. It became
particularly influential for the development of functionalist language theories, via its
quotation (ironically, as the “traditional model of language”) and augmentation to a six-

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functions-model by Roman Jakobson in his 1960 essay on “Linguistics and Poetics”,
which informed later functionalist theorists, such as Dell Hymes (1968) and Michael
A.K. Halliday (1978). Bühler’s model has also been revived by Jürgen Habermas, who in
his theory of communicative action uses the three functional dimensions as reference
points for a model of the social significance of communication. According to Habermas,
every speaker, when making a meaningful utterance, intends it to be understood by the
hearer as legitimate (within the social context), truthful (i.e. as an expression of the
speaker’s own convictions) and true (in relation to objective states of affairs). Even
though these assumptions are often disappointed in actual communication, they act as
regulating norms for meaningful social exchange (cf. Habermas 1971, 1981, vol. 1: 372-
377, 412). Independently of this theory strand, a possible ‘underground’ influence of
Bühler’s concept of language function on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has
been discussed, especially with regard to the concept of language as a ‘form of life’ (cf.
Toulmin 1970), Kaplan 1984 and Eschbach 1988b).

3. Deixis and Symbolization

The discussion of the axioms makes up only one of the four chapters of the
Sprachtheorie. In the remaining parts Bühler deals with a wealth of linguistic phenomena
ranging from phonology and morphology over syntax and case theory to textual and
stylistic problems. The theoretical principle unifying this tour de force is the distinction
between signs that gain their precise meaning in the situation context, (i.e. the spatio-
temporal surroundings, the relationship of speaker and listener, their common
background knowledge and action goals) and linguistic signs forming meaningful
syntagmatic structures that are detachable from the immediate situation. Bühler uses the
terms Zeigfeld (‘deictic field’) and Symbolfeld (‘symbol-field’) as labels for these two
types of contextual structures. This concept of language as a ‘field’-phenomenon has
little in common with the theories of ‘semantic fields’ that were developed by
contemporary linguists in Germany (Jost Trier, Leo Weisgerber, Walter Porzig). Whereas
their analyses concentrate on lexical structures, Bühler’s ‘two-field-theory’ explicates the

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communicative purposes of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic field-phenomena in
language. Bühler’s theory thus not only covers an amazingly wide range of language
phenomena but it provides, as Garvin (1966, 1994) has pointed out, an alternative to the
rigid ‘syntax-semantics-pragmatics’ distinction, which was developed later. Apart from
its general appeal as an approach to ‘unifying’ phonological, syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic analyses, three aspects of Bühler’s field theory are of special interest for
pragmatics: 1) his treatment of deixis, 2) his explication of the concepts of ‘speech
situation’ and ‘speech action’, and 3) his observations on creative language use.

3.1) The deictic field

According to Bühler, all linguistic signs, whose “meaning is fulfilled and made definite”
in the context of the discourse situation, belong to the deictic field (Bühler 1990: 94). The
origin of deixis — here Bühler again relies on Brugmann and Wegener — is the
‘egocentric’ basis of all demonstration: the I-now-here-position of the speaker, which
serves as the starting point for spatial, temporal and social orientation and co-ordination
between communication partners. The primary deictic context is confined to the
demonstratio ad oculos (‘visual [or other sensory] demonstration’). The next step towards
an extension of the interlocutors’ shared horizon is the use of the co-ordinates of the
demonstratio for purposes of ‘imagination-oriented deixis’ (Deixis am Phantasma). Far
from being restricted to fictional representation, imagination-oriented deixis is present in
everyday language use and most other registers of speech. When referring to objects that
are not directly ‘given’ in the discourse situation, speaker and hearer must either project
them linguistically into that situation context (e.g. by putting a problem ‘before’
themselves) or, vice versa, project their own situation co-ordinates onto an imagined
context (e.g. describing an imagined route by way of positioning the interlocutors’ deictic
roles in it), or use a mixture of both these conceptualisation strategies. This classification
has been used in modern text theory as a basis for differentiating the narrator’s roles in
literary and media texts (cf. Conte et al. 1989).
The distinction of situationally ‘bound’ and semantically more independent forms
of linguistic deixis lies at the heart of Bühler’s concept of a gradual ‘emancipation’ of

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language from the immediate situation context (1934: 140-148; 1990: 158-166).
According to this concept, the highest developmental ‘stage’ of deictic language is
reached, when deictic signs are used anaphorically and cataphorically as “joints of
speech”, e.g. as relative pronouns, text-deictic prepositions, prepositional adverbs or
conjunctions (1934: 385-397; 1990: 438-452). At this stage, speech becomes reflexive:
the symbol-field is ‘reconstructed’ along deictic co-ordinates; deictic signs are used
quasi-metaphorically to ‘demonstrate’ deictic relationships within a representational
context. These concepts have influenced modern, pragmatically oriented studies of deixis
(cf. Ehlich 1996: 959, Green 1997; Hörmann 1978: 394-424, Innis 1992: 556-557).

3.2) Language use as social action

For Bühler, “all concrete speech is in vital union with the rest of a person’s meaningful
behaviour: it is among actions and is itself an action” (1990: 61). This action-aspect
forms part of the axioms; in the Sprachtheorie it is one of the four aspects in axiom (C)
and it is taken up again in the “symbol field” chapter. Speech as action is for Bühler the
communicative exchange of signs for the purpose of enhanced co-ordination and co-
operation (cf. also his use of the terms Zeichenverkehr and Sprechverkehr in Bühler
1927: 38-54, 1933a: 41, 1934 and 1938). In order to reach an adequate understanding of
speech as action, Bühler built on early holistic approaches in developmental psychology
as well as in thought and action psychology (for an overview cf. Knobloch &
Schallenberger 1993). In the Axiomatik essay he praised in particular a paper on “Sprache
als Handlung” (‘Language as action’), which the psychologist Abraham Anton
Grünbaum (1885-1932) had given at a linguistics workshop organized by Bühler for the
German psychological congress in Hamburg in 1931. For Grünbaum, action was the
dynamic ‘system of (individual) organism and environment’ (System: Organismus —
Umwelt); its constitutive aspects were the subject’s ‘need’ (Bedürfnis), ‘intention’
(Intention), ‘active completion’ (Erledigung) and ‘reaction to the completion of the
action’ (Erledigungsreaktion). In the case of a speech action the ‘completion reaction’
consists of the subject’s conscious realisation that the process of meaning constitution has
been concluded (Grünbaum 1932: 165-173). Bühler, after highlighting the distinction

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between subjective and objective factors, relabels the completion reaction as Erfüllung
(‘fulfilment’), following his wife’s definition of this category for developmental
psychology (Bühler 1933a: 50-51). Insofar as the ‘completion’/‘fulfilment reaction’ can
be understood as a “feedback” control, this speech action model closely resembles
cybernetic concepts of communication (for Bühler’s early interest in cybernetics cf.
Bühler 1960: 50-62 and Ungeheuer 1967).
In the Sprachtheorie, ‘speech action’ (Sprechhandlung) means the concrete act of
verbal communication (1934: 55-57; 1990: 65-66), in contrast to the ‘speech act’
(Sprechakt): the latter term designates a speaker’s ‘virtual’ meaning intention, a concept
that Bühler had taken over from Husserl’s theory of ‘sense-conferring acts’; however, it
also refers to other contemporary philosophers’ speech-act terminology (1934: 62-65;
1990: 73-74; cf. also Nerlich & Clarke 1996: 194-198, 211-215). Vis-à-vis these ‘subject-
related’ aspects, the ‘subject-independent’ side of language is represented in axiom (C)
by the aspects: ‘work’ (Werk) and ‘structure’ (Gebilde); the main focus here is on the
social dimension of conforming to or creatively violating linguistic conventions. This
perspective, however, leaves the intersubjective dimension of the speaker-hearer
exchange, which Bühler had emphasized so strongly in the organon-model, largely
unaccounted for. Within the four-aspects scheme, intersubjectivity would best fit the
‘speech action’ aspect but this seems to be contradicted by the inclusion of this aspect in
the subject-related side of the scheme (for criticism of this and other ambiguities of the
four- aspects scheme cf. Camhy 1980: 69-83, Ortner 1986, Vonk 1992: 256-259).
Assuming that the speech action aspect was meant to also include the speaker-hearer
relationship, Bühler’s concept of speech action might be interpreted as the starting point
for a theory of communication that explicates the speaker’s ‘completion’/‘fulfilment’
reaction as being characterised by the intention of securing the hearer’s ‘uptake’ of the
message.
Such an interpretation would fit in well with Bühler’s discussion of one- or two-
word utterances in everyday communication, which had been treated traditionally as
examples of ‘ellipsis’ (1934: 156-159, 1990:176-179; cf. also Klein 1984, Ortner 1983).
In order to account for these functionally sufficient but apparently not syntactically ‘well-
formed’ utterance types, Bühler introduces the category of a ‘sympractical field’

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(sympraktisches Umfeld). The corresponding characterization of language use is
‘empractical speech’. Empractical speech can be observed, for instance, when a ticket-
buyer demands a specific kind of ticket or a patron in a coffee-house asks to be served a
particular type of coffee by way of merely uttering a short phrase. Typically in such
situations, the speaker doesn’t have to produce fully explicit and grammatically ‘well-
formed’ requests because the interlocutor, on account of shared situation (Umfeld-)
knowledge, understands the action-plan – in a modern terminology: the script – and
therefore uses the language sign only as a diacritic to indicate the choice of a specific
object (Bühler 1934: 158; 1990: 179).
In addition to the concept of a ‘sympractical’ field, Bühler introduces two further
context categories, i.e. the ‘symphysical’ field (of physical surroundings that determine
the meaning of a sign) and the ‘synsemantic’ field; this latter concept comes close to that
of the symbol field (cf. Bühler 1934: 159-168; 1990: 179-189). The overlap between the
sympractical-symphysical-synsemantic distinction on the one hand and the notion of two
principal language fields (deictic field and symbol field) on the other blurs the exact
meaning of the basic ‘field-theoretical’ concept to some extent, which is indicative of
Bühler’s difficulties to integrate his focus on the communicative dimension of language
with the general concept of linguistics, which was still predominantly oriented towards
accounting for language as a system of representation. This problem has to be taken into
account when assessing Bühler’s use of ‘pragmatic’ concepts, such as speech action,
sympractical field and verbal exchange — it would be anachronistic to equate them, for
instance, with post-Austin formulations of “speech act theory” or conversational analysis.
Instead, they should be interpreted in the context of his own theory and against the
background of contemporary or preceding linguistic thinking. With regard to the concept
of speech action, the Axiomatik essay offers more conceptual perspectives than the
axioms of the Sprachtheorie, but the latter gives detailed consideration to the problem of
empractical speech. Generalizing Bühler’s observations on the latter issue, one might
even argue that all language use is empractical, insofar as it is always aimed at resolving
ambiguities of intersubjective co-operation, which could not be solved as easily without
the use of linguistic signs.

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3.3. Communicative creativity

Human language is for Bühler the most efficient communication system, as it enables its
users to express and exchange new experiences and thus extend their common horizon.
Its ‘symbol-field’ structure of lexicon and syntax gives them a means to introduce new
meanings to each other, because the combination of a limited set of lexical signs and of
rules for ordering them into complex signs allows for an unlimited range of meaningful
representations. New sign combinations and new concepts can be intelligible even though
they have been hitherto unknown for the receiver of a ‘speech action’, on account of the
complementarity of the two sign fields: New grammatical and lexical symbol-structures
can be disambiguated by a familiar situation (deictic field), and, conversely, a new
situational experience can be conveyed by way of figuratively using well-known symbol-
field structures (1934: 69-78, 199-120; 1990: 81-90, 135-136). These innovative
meaning-effects can be compared to changes in the figure-ground relationship in sensory
perception, which do not just affect parts of entities but their Gestalt-character (cf. Innis
1988: 97-98; Musolff 1990: 92-113, Vonk 1992: 45-71).
Compound lexemes and metaphors serve to illustrate Bühler’s application of
Gestalt-theory to the analysis of language. With explicit reference to Christian von
Ehrenfels’ 1890 essay on ‘Gestalt-qualities’, Bühler characterises compounds as
‘supersummative’ symbol combinations, whose meanings are ‘more than the sum’ of
their component parts (Bühler 1934: 341-342, 349; 1990: 389-390, 399; cf. also Brekle
1985: 181-183, Musolff 1990: 114-137). Correspondingly, metaphors can be said to have
a ‘subsummative’ effect, i.e. they filter matching aspects of the ‘meaning spheres’ of their
‘literal’ and ‘image’ elements so as to produce a semantic intersection, which can be used
to remedy a want of an expression or provide a characteristic account of an experience or
idea that was not ‘covered’ by hitherto existing vocabulary or phraseology (Bühler 1934:
343-346; 1990: 392-395). This classification of semantic phenomena along the categories
of ‘super’- and ‘subsummativity’ suffers from a degree of oversimplification: when taken
literally it might lead to the paradoxical conclusion that metaphorical compounds must be
classified as being ‘super’- and ‘subsummative’ at the same time. Notwithstanding such
theory-internal problems, Bühler’s treatment of compounds and metaphors in the context

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his Gestalt-theoretical perspective on language function is highly innovative, as it
foreshadows later approaches that take account of the role these phenomena play in
communicative creativity (cf. Hülzer-Vogt 1989: 9, 28-36, Musolff 1993: 262-267, Innis
1992: 560-561). Other elements of Bühler’s symbol-field theory have been used in
communication-oriented approaches to questions of stylistic variation (cf. Ueda
1986:376-380) as well as in the analysis of proper names, stereotype semantics and
ellipsis (cf. Brekle 1988, Cattaruzza Derossi 1988, Ortner 1988).

4. Critical evaluation

Bühler’s functionalist theory offers a wealth of new perspectives for a pragmatically

oriented linguistics, although it does not in itself give a systematic account of ‘how to do
things with words’. Nerlich and Clarke (1996: 236) conclude that Bühler “never crossed
the last hurdle on his way to a fully developed theory of linguistic pragmatics”, despite
being one of the most important figures among language researchers engaged in
‘pragmatics avant la lettre’. This may to some extent be viewed as a tragic ‘collateral’
result of his personal fate as a victim of the Nazi invasion of Austria. Bühler had intended
to complement his treatment of the representational function in the Sprachtheorie by two
books on the remaining functions: expression and appeal, which might have contained
important statements on language aspects that are nowadays regarded as prime objects of
pragmatics (cf. Bühler’s remarks on publication plans in 1933b: IV and 1934: 33, 1990:
39; the list of unpublished material in his estate in Camhy [1980: 147-151] has several
items that concern pragmatic topics). More significantly, however, it has to be borne in
mind that Bühler’s work predates, and thus was unaffected by the ‘institutionalization’ of
linguistic pragmatics as a separate branch of language study. His functionalist account of
language offers a chance to analyze pragmatic, phonological, syntactic and semantic
structures in conjunction, irrespective of ‘demarcation lines’ that have been erected since
the establishment of ‘autonomous’ communication theories. Bühler neither had to set up
nor defend a specifically pragmatic approach against competing models of linguistics; he
viewed langue and parole as complementary and, indeed, interdependent aspects of

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language. His ‘failure’ to establish pragmatics as an independent sub-discipline can thus
be seen as a constant reminder of the necessity to critically re-evaluate its epistemological
status as a model of the relationship between language structure and language use.

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