The single conference talk Umfelder and interpretation. A Coserian perspective

The Center for Hermeneutics “Symbols and Texts” (CHeST) of “Danubius” University of Galati, in partnership with The Central University Library “Mihai Eminescu” of Iasi, organizes on Tuesday, the 26^th of October 2021, at 17.00, the single conference talk Umfelder and interpretation. A Coserian perspective, delivered on-line, in English, by Professor Klaas Willems, Ph.D., from University of Ghent (Belgium).

In this talk professor Klaas Willems discusses Eugenio Coseriu’s theory of “Umfelder” (Sp. “entornos”) as presented in “Determinación y entorno. Dos problemas de una lingüistica del hablar” (1955-1956) and later briefly resumed in his Textlinguistik (2007 [1980]). Coseriu distinguishes four "Umfelder" (situation, region, context and universe of discourse), which K.W. will apply to a particular text (a political cartoon) in order to gauge the applicability and usefulness of Coseriu’s framework. In a second part of his talk, K.W. puts forth the question in what sense Coseriu’s framework is different and complementary to other approaches of discourses and texts such as D. Hymes’ SPEAKING model and the Neo-Gricean theory of Conversational Implicatures. He concludes that Coseriu’s framework provides us with an 'embarrassment of riches' in terms of concepts and distinctions that are key when trying to reconstruct the settings of a particular text in order to account for its “Sinn” (Sp. "sentido") from a hermeneutic perspective.

Klaas Willems (b. 1965) is a professor of General linguistics at Ghent University. His research interests include semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, case theory, the theory and philosophy of language, and the history of the language sciences. His publications include five books and some 80 articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of Historiographia Linguistica (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins).