166 / 298
Horst Steinke
166
crear universales fantásticos, crean “mundos” (o fragmentos de mundos) solo
“posibles” […]. (Both poetry (art) as well as language, by creating imaginative
universals, create only possible “worlds” (or parts of worlds))» (Id.,
El lugar de
los universales fantásticos en la filosofía de Vico,
cit., p. 20).
301
M. Agrimi similarly noted certain dissimilarities of motives: «In Vico
comunque convergono e tendono a integrarsi motivi diversi e talvolta opposti.
La dottrina della naturalità del linguaggio muove dai “parlari muti”, passa alla
teoria delle interiezioni […], cui seguono i pronomi […], per giungere […] ai
nomina
[…]. Una forza originaria hanno le onomatopee […], ma un ruolo fon-
damentale ha poi la teoria della metafora, […] puntando sulla capacità creativa
di immagini […] (In Vico, however, diverse and sometimes opposite motives
converge and tend to be integrated. The theory of the natural genesis of lan-
guage starts with «mute speech», moves to the theory of interjections […], fol-
lowed by the pronouns […], to be joined […] to the
nouns
[…]. The onomat-
opoeic names have originary power […], but then the theory of metaphor has
a fundamental role, pointing to the creative potential of images)» (Id.,
Ontologia
storica del linguaggio in Vico
, in
Teorie e pratiche linguistiche nell’Italia del Settecento
, ed.
by L. Formigari, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1984, pp. 37-60, p. 47).
In this context, the work of J. Trabant on Vico’s “philosophy of language”
is directly relevant. Trabant persuasively argues for understanding Vico’s
thought as explicating
semiotics/“sematology”
rather than
linguistics
as usually un-
derstood (see Id.,
Sémata: Beyond Pagliaro’s Vico
, in
Italian Studies in Linguistic
Historiography. Proceedings of the Conference “In ricordo di Antonino Pagliaro
– Gli studi
italiani di storiografia linguistica”
,
Rome 23-24 January 1992
, Münster, Nodus Pu-
blikationen, 1994, pp. 69-82). Trabants’s key insight is that Vico was con-
cerned primarily with language as the carrier of
messages
, not linguistics by and
of itself: «But his simply means that Vico uses traditional knowledge of lin-
guistic structure to explain the
functioning
of language. The
genetic base
of words,
however, are propositions, predicatives, structure, and thus messages. Under-
lying every word is a proposition of the kind “a is b” – for example, “the fa-
ther is a parent”, “the father is a poet”, “the father is an arms-bearer”, etc. But
since Vico equates
nature
and birth (
nascimento
), every word contains,
aufgehoben
[subsumed] in it, the message from which it derives. Words are therefore es-
sentially –
naturaliter
–
messages» (
ibid.
, p. 76; italics original). Furthermore,
verbal (phonic/written) language is only one side of the fundamental
messaging
faculty and impulse, the other side consists of non-verbal means of communi-
cation, the “gestural-visual”, with images and gestures (
ibid.
, pp. 77-78). Paren-
thetically, it could be added that in moving to the next, lower, stratum of lan-
guage, that is, individual lexical categories, Vico evinces analogous focus on
the underlying psycho-social processes, correctly understood/applied or not,