The semantic theory of P. Bottura of Zadar

Sažetak

Ideologia by Pietro Bottura (1832) is unique attem pt in our philosophical and linguistic literature so far, »to apply philosophy to grammar«, i. e. logical linguistics. He conceived his »logical grammar«, as he termed it, at the period when on the one hand thinkers had just started to abandon the theory of language in the spirit of Locke’s theory of ideas and tried to introduce the notion of the semantic form, later to be termed structure, i. e. the earliest approach to language as a formal organization of signs; while on the other hand the illuministic model o science and the empirical method of linguistic investigation had become consolidated, and Hamann had just hinted at Humboldt’s historical organicism, a concept which separated linguistic theory and the empirical research method. Therefore the evaluation of Bottura’s semantic theory appears as the determination of the proper place of this lesser, unknown philosopher from Zadar in the moment of bifurcation of illuministic empiricism - a line which, stretching from Bacon, Galileo and the French illuminists to the modern neo-illuminists, built its basic tenets into modern linguistics - and Humboldt’s romanticism which is, in the opinion of some, the forerunner of modern structural linguistics, and in the opinion of others only a factor connecting different lines of development rather than a cluster of new beginnings.