From symbolic forma to lexical semantics: Where modern linguistics and Cassirer's philosophy start to converge

Ernst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on th e constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists an d Chomskian Generativists. In the-last decade, however, a new and promising linguistic framework has emerged - the framework of lexical semantics - wh ich seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In th is paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philoso phical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position thes e empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone o f both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: (i) natur al language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; (ii) the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian s ense, comprises a partial set of semantic notions, which language selects a s centers of perceptual attention; (iii) this partial set is potentially di fferent from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, scien ce, and art; and (iv) linguistic variability is to be explained in universa listic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within uni versally-constrained limits.