Eugenio Coseriu

Eugenio Coseriu (1921–2002) is considered to be one of the most important linguistic scholars in the second half of the 20th century. He is known mainly as a structuralist and a Romance linguist, but his work goes far beyond this and offers a comprehensive linguistic theory, with writings on a wide range of issues from semantics, syntax, typology, variational linguistics, language change, pragmatics, and text linguistics to empirical fields such as Vulgar Latin, the history of the philosophy of language, and the history of Romance linguistics. His thought is founded on solid philosophic grounds, and his life brought him into contact with a number of different academic traditions and cultures. However, for a variety of reasons (among which, the dominant languages in which he published: Spanish, Italian, French, and German), knowledge of Coseriu’s thought is rather marginal in the Anglo-American world. This book aims to go some way to correcting this by offering an overview of Coseriu’s main contributions to linguistics (and to other disciplines) in English. It is of general interest for the study of linguistics, the history of linguistics, and the philosophy of language, as well as for a broader reading public.