Remember Wegener?!

Brigitte Nerlich
University of Nottingham

My old book Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener has just come out as an ebook. It was first published in 1990 and has now been reissued in Routledge’s History of Linguistic Thought Series. That is a good occasion to look back at one of the book’s protagonists: Philipp Wegener (1848–1916). His work has a lot to offer to linguists, as well as computer scientists and people dealing with AI’s famous Large Language Models.

The following summary of his work is based on a chapter of the book devoted to Wegener, which I had also summarised in a 1988 contribution to the Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society, a society then in its infancy and a haven for me as a budding historian of linguistics.

When I started to read Wegener in the 1980s, he was a relatively neglected figure in the history of linguistics compared to the big historical-comparative names of nineteenth-century linguistics, what one might call the sound-law hunters and the philological detail-collectors. Things have changed, and his work has been studied by historians of linguistics ever since – see further readings.

Wegener’s work had some influential admirers, though, at a time when linguists started to pay more attention to context, situation and social interaction as factors in language, communication and language, especially semantic change. In the early 20^th century, the Egyptologist and general linguist Alan Henderson Gardiner, the anthropologist and general linguist Bronislaw Malinowski and the founder of functional and contextualist linguistics John Rupert Firth all read him closely. Gardiner went as far as calling him a pioneer of linguistic theory. I think he was right, as I will try to show in the following.

Language and life

The title of Wegener’s 1885 book, Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, translates roughly as “investigations into the fundamental questions of the life of language”. The word Sprachleben, “language-life”, sounds like it is promising readers some standard nineteenth-century organicism, language as a living growing thing with a will of its own – think about the work of Arsène Darmesteter for example, whose book on the ‘life of words’ (1886) appeared roughly at the same time as the Grundfragen.

However, by the time Wegener has finished defining his terms and laid the groundwork for his theory, all the biology has been removed. Language, for him, is a collective abstraction, a name for certain muscular movements that a community has agreed to associate with certain meanings. Speech is the concrete activity built on that shared knowledge. And the proper definition of language itself is not organic at all: it is an instrument of communicative interaction, aimed at mutual influence. Language is essentially intentional and dialogic. It structures social life. There is no ghost in the machine, no life force, just people doing things to each other with sound.

Meaning as co-construction

The part of Wegener’s theory I find myself returning to most is his account of how words come to mean anything. His answer is not that words carry meaning around inside them like little parcels. Words are summonses or imperatives instructing the hearer to go and retrieve something they already know, something they have associated with that sound in a previous situation. A sentence is a string of such reminders: an instruction to reconstruct meaning, laboriously at first, then, once habituated to it, so automatically that neither speaker nor hearer notices the work being done at all.

This is where his idea of the ‘exposition’ comes in, which is one of those concepts that is obvious once someone points it out and invisible beforehand. An exposition is the given or everything that prepares the ground so the hearer can catch the so-called ‘predicate’, the actual news conveyed in a joint speech act. To construct meaning from an utterance, the hearer must draw conclusions from the nature of the predicate itself, as well as the verbal co-text and the situational context. The task for the speaker is to get the balance right between exposition and predicate. Get the balance wrong, give too little exposition or too much, and communication begins to creak, misunderstandings occur and repairs have to be carried out.

Wegener thought that this constant, unglamorous work of calibrating what the hearer already knows against what you are about to tell them was, historically, one of the engines behind the evolution of language and grammar itself. That, for Wegener, is the life of language – a process of continuous and joint problem solving.

Tucked into all this is a small but elegant account of how metaphor happens and what it does: a predicate, understood at first only by inference from its co-text or context of situation, gets used often enough that the inference stops being effortful and the metaphor matures into an exposition. It becomes background, common ground, conventional language that is no longer felt as figurative at all. This has been at the back of my mind when studying, over the last few years, the emergence and spread of AI metaphors: watch an AI ‘co-pilot’ or a ‘hallucination’ long enough and it stops working as a metaphor and starts working as cognitive and linguistic furniture.

Over time Wegener’s theory of language and meaning has steadily influenced linguists from those working within the context of the London School of Linguistics established by Firth and Malinowski, to psychologists working on pragmatics, humour and contextual understanding (see Attardo, 2016). More recently, with the advent of large language models and ‘computational hermeneutics’, I have argued that we should look for inspiration not only in Dilthey or Gadamer, but even more in the theory of situated meaning that Philipp Wegener developed (see Nerlich, 2025).

From Wegener to large language models

One cannot write something like ‘words are instructions to retrieve already-known associations’ in 2026 without thinking about large language models. There is indeed some surface resemblance between how language works according to Wegener and how large language models work. This is, however, a surface resemblance. It quickly begins to creak. Both Wegener’s humans and LLMs achieve meaning by reconstructing it from prior associations rather than unpacking it from tidy packages contained inside words, but that is perhaps as far as it goes.

Wegener’s hearer is a person, embedded in a shared situation, doing inferential work in service of another person’s intentions, in a relationship that is irreducibly about mutual influence. Nothing in an LLM’s — or, more precisely, a transformer’s — next-token prediction has intentions, or a hearer it is trying to influence, or a situation it was present for. The parallel is worth noticing precisely so one can see where it breaks down, and this is usually, as regular readers of my Making Science Public blog will know, where the interesting linguistic problems live and where the light gets in.

For those who want to explore Wegener’s work, that of his intellectual soul-mates, and that of the scholars now returning to him, here is a rather long but hopefully inspiring list of references. And if you want to plunge right in, you can listen to a podcast on the life and work of Wegener as a pioneer of linguistic functionalism here on the blog.

References – Wegener

Wegener, Ph. (1885). Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens. Halle a.d. Saale: Niemeyer.

Translation:

Wegener, Ph. (1885), Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of Language Life, Halle: Niemeyer. (New edition 1991 with introduction by Clemens Knobloch, Amsterdam: Benjamins; [problematic] English trans.: 1971, Speech and Reason: Language disorder in mental disease. A translation of ‘The Life of Speech’ by Philipp Wegener, trans. by Wilfred D. Abse, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.)

Wegener, Ph. (1902), Review of Delbrück (1901) Grundfragen der Sprachforschung, mit Rücksicht auf W. Wundts Sprachpsychologie erörtert. Literarisches Centralblatt 12 (22 March), cols. 401–410.

Wegener, Ph. (1921). Der Wortsatz. Indogermanische Forschungen, 39: 1–26.

References – contemporaries

Bréal, M. (1897). Essai de sémantique: (science des significations). Paris: Hachette.

Darmesteter, A. (1886). The Life of Words as Symbols of Ideas. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.

Firth, J. (1957). A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory, 1930-55. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis (pp. 1-31). Special Volume of the Philological Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gardiner, A. H. (1932). The Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Malinowski, B. (1923). The problem of meaning in primitive language. In: Ogden and Richards (1923) The Meaning of Meaning. Supplement I (pp. 296-336). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Inc.

Secondary sources

Attardo S. (2016). Context as relevance-driven abduction and charitable satisficing. Frontiers in Psychology Mar 8(7), 305. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00305.

Bologna, M. P. (2009). Aspetti funzionali e pragmatici nel pensiero linguistico di Philipp Wegener. Con la traduzione antologica di Philipp Wegener, Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens. By Maria Paola Tenchini. Historiographia Linguistica, 36(2-3), 447-451.

Elffers-van Ketel, E. (1993). Philipp Wegener as a proto-speech act theorist. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 10(1), 49-59.

Knobloch, C. (1988), Geschichte der psychologischen Sprachauffassung in Deutschland von 1850 bis 1920, Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Knobloch, C. (2011). Sprachpsychologie: Ein Beitrag zur Problemgeschichte und Theoriebildung (Vol. 51). Walter de Gruyter.

Knobloch, C. (2011). Introduction to the new edition. In Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens: Reprint from the 1885 edition (pp. xi-li). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Knobloch, C. (2012). Wegener, Philipp. Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories, edited by R. W. Rieber. New York: Springer, 1184-1186.

Nerlich, B. (1986). La linguistique de Philipp Wegener — une théorie du dialogue. DRLAV. Revue de linguistique, 34–35: 301–315.

Nerlich, B. (1988). Philipp Wegener’s (1848–1916) Theory of Language and Communication.  Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas Bulletin, 11(1): 11–13.

Nerlich, B. (1990), Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener. London: Routledge. E-book 2026.

Nerlich, B. (1992).  Semantic theories in Europe, 1830-1930. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Nerlich, B. (1996). Egyptology, linguistics and anthropology: Malinowski and Gardiner on the functions of language. Linguists and their Diversions. Festschrift for Robert H. Robins on his 75th birthday. Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 361-394.

Nerlich, B. (2022). Grace Andrus de Laguna: A perspective from the history of linguistics. Australasian Philosophical Review, 6(1), 68-77. (Contains a good summary of Wegener)

Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (1996), Language, Action and Context: The early history of pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780–1930, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Nerlich, B. (2025). Understanding computational hermeneutics. Making meaning between the past and the present. Making Science Public Blog, 5 September.

Tenchini, M. P. (2020, April). Wegener’s Wortsatz and the notion of sentence. In History of Linguistics 2017: Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, (ICHoLS 14), Paris, 28 August–1 September (Vol. 127, p. 49). John Benjamins Publishing Company.