The Ideality of Linguistic Phenomena

Abstract

The three headings that we specified above, however, are still quite ambiguous; due to the abundant obscurity of the terms 20 employed they require further distinction and clarification. First, we recognize that we must not overlook a certain distinction where the term speech or language is concerned. We distinguish the articulated word, speech that is spoken at present taken as a sensuous phenomenon, especially as an acoustical phenomenon, 25 from the word and proposition itself or from a string of propositions itself making up a larger discourse. It is for good reason that we speak precisely of a repetition of the same words and sentences in the event we are not understood, repeating [what we have said]. In a treatise, in a novel, every word, every sentence 30 is singularly unique, and it cannot be duplicated by a repeated reading, be it aloud or to oneself. Indeed, in this case it is not a matter of who reads it: each one having his own voice, intonation, etc. We distinguish not only the treatise itself (taken here in merely a grammatical sense of a composition of words and 35 language) from the manifolds of uttered reproductions, but likewise from the manifold documentations that endure on paper