La théorie des champs lexicaux: un essai de sémantique saussurienne?

Weisgerber and Trier’s Wortfeldheorie has been considered the first consistent outcome of post-Saussurean semantics as well as the first step towards an “ontological structuralism” (Eco 1984). I will show that the Neo-Humboldtian approach could be seen, instead, as an attempt to read the Saussurean conception of language in the light of the Humboldtian notion of language as energeia. Thus, if from a methodological point of view the neo-Humboldtians surely hastens the “structuralist turn”, Trier’s theory in particular highlights the contradictions of the CGL’s dichotomies, avoiding to some extent the risks of the “Saussurean vulgata” attributed to the classical Structural Semantics paradigm