The Humboldtian Concept of Language and Discourse as a Creative Act

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to focus precisely on “speech in its entirety” when considering the Humboldtian conception of language, because Humboldt directly links the functional essence of language (and, correspondingly, its creativity) to speech: “die Devinition des jedesmaligen Sprechens ... kann man nur gleich an die Totalität dieses Sprechens als die Sprache ansehen”.