Wilbur Marshall Urban’s Philosophical Influence on Eugenio Coseriu’s Integral Linguistics

In 1939 the American philosopher W.M. Urban published a massive treatise on language philosophy entitled Language and Reality. In the ’50s, during his stay in Uruguay, as a professor of linguistics at the University of Montevideo, Eugenio Coseriu read attentively this work and retained some elements (functions of evocation, the elliptical character of language, universe of discourse etc.), taking them over in his integral linguistics. In this article, I aim at identifying these concepts (essential for Coseriu’s linguistic theory), relating them to the original contexts of W.M. Urban’s treatise