Since language is the collective focus of this series, the present paper follows both historiographical and theoretical perspectives.
The first deals with Prague as a Middle-European town, with a German and Czech University from 1882, where a philosopher, Anton Marty, from the Brentano school, focuses on language and semasiology in the framework of a psychology from an empirical standpoint. He cites Christian von Ehrenfels, and underscores the relational approach to psychic dynamism but, crucially, he emphasises the oscillations between linguistic “sketches” and semantic comprehension.
Simultaneously, Vilém Mathesius, forthcoming founder (1926) of the Prague Linguistic Circle, dealing with English language and literature, enquires into the spontaneous ability of listeners to grasp, infer, integrate ellipsis in a sentence, consisting of a missing word,
The effort to obtain the whole, via super- or even subsummativity processes, has been a special topic for Gestalt psychology. Context being the proper habitat for both language and mind, we follow the