Braucht eine Textlinguistik Kategorien des Sinns? Sinnkritische Bemerkungen zu Frege, Coseriu und Luhmann

In this paper, I inquire whether the discipline of discourse analysis (textual linguistics) needs to accept categories of meaning into its work. I direct the inquiry from the position of meaning scepticism such as argued in Nielsen (2003). The consequences of discarding meaning as an object of textual research are illuminated by means of a model that, taking textual usage for its object, turns usage into a purely material, deterministic and decidable affair. As contrast, three non-material, non-deterministic and undecidable models of meanings are presented: one assembling Frege’s scattered comments on linguistic matters into a conception of meaning as sceptical as my own, one depicting Coseriu’s approach to meaning as a hermeneutic mix of psychology (Bühler) and glossematics (Hjelmslev), and one attempting to bring out the internal (and intended) paradoxes of Luhmann’s constructivistic theory of meaning. I conclude by intimating that discourse analysts will have to choose: either they abandon meaning, or their work will have an equal share in the undecidabilities (be they hermeneutic, constructivistic or whatever) of meaning