1Appearing in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (as innere Sprachform), the concept of inner form is at the heart of the development of a strong non-naturalistic, psychological approach to the study of language in the second half of the 19th century. Thanks to the successive contributions of Heyman Steinthal, Aleksandr Potebnja, Wilhelm Wundt, or Anton Marty, the psychological tradition of inner form – which was explicitly identified as a continuous historical trend by Potebnja (1999 [1862]) and, after him, by Andrej Belyj (1910) – functioned as one of the most potent agents of philosophical and methodological renewal of the dominant historicist, organicist or neo-grammarian conceptions of language. The relevance of inner form and its tradition seem to have abbetted at the turn of the 20th century, with the emergence and subsequent triumph of the decidedly anti-psychologistic paradigms of logical positivism, phenomenology and, of course, structuralism. Inner form is a motive, however, that continued to appear with a certain consistency across the works of several prominent figures of structural linguistics and phenomenology of language: Gustav Špet, Roman Jakobson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty all refer to it.
2Interestingly, the occurrences of inner form in the contexts of phenomenological and structural thought seem to coincide with important examples of theoretical convergence between the two intellectual traditions. Špet was both a precursor of structuralism (Dennes 1997, 2008) and the first propagator of Husserl’s phenomenology in Russia (Haardt 1993); Jakobson’s linguistics has been famously presented as a “phenomenological structuralism” (Holenstein 1976, cf. also Sönesson 2015; Aurora 2017); and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language was deeply indebted to his (admittedly highly creative) reading of Saussure (Stawarska 2013; Foultier 2018). In addition, the concept of inner form itself seems to provide one of the most substantive conceptual and historical links between these three notable attempts to think of language in conjointly structuralist and phenomenological terms. Špet’s hermeneutically-oriented, proto-structuralist interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology (cf. Cassedy 1997; Plotnikov 2006) is steeped in a critical reading of Marty’s and Potebnja’s notion of inner form (cf. Dennes 2006; Venditti 2008; Bourgeot 2021); Jakobson was significantly influenced by Špet’s interpretation of Husserl (cf. Holenstein 1975; Dennes 1997; Plotnikov 2006) and was involved in direct polemics with the students of both Potebnja and Špet precisely over the scope and function of inner form (cf. Šor 2016; Pilščikov 2017); Merleau-Ponty’s recourse to inner form, which he links to the notion of expressive “style” (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1964[1952]: 88), recalls Marty’s comparison of inner form to architectural style (cf. Kiesow 1990: 61), and is functionally comparable to the “poetic” role given to it by Jakobson in his structural model of language functions (Jakobson 1960; cf. Leistle 2018).
3This surprisingly dense entanglement of structural and phenomenological treatments of the concept of inner form obviously raises questions as to the concept’s relevance not only to structuralism and phenomenology, but also to the complex process of their convergence in Špet’s, Jakobson’s, and Merleau-Ponty’s respective theories of language. What is it about inner form that made it of interest to these proponents both of phenomenology of language and of structural linguistics and which seemingly enabled it to provide an effective bridge between two traditions that are often seen as competing and antogonistic? Is inner form an artefact accidentally surviving from the 19th century linguistic debates that inspired phenomenologists and structuralists (by contrast, despite Husserl’s strong interest for Marty’s work, inner form left no trace in his Logical Investigations)? Or was it a structuring principle in the emergence of the original, structural-phenomenological approaches to language one finds in Špet, Jakobson, Merleau-Ponty? Finally, can inner form cast a light on the specificity and originality of these thinkers, either individually or as presumed participants in a broader effort to articulate a structural-phenomenology theory of language?
- 1 On the entanglement of phenomenology and structuralism, cf. Holenstein 1976; Cadiot & Visetti 2001; (...)
4The hypothesis which we will explore in the following pages is that inner form was indeed a substantive source or catalyser of innovation in structuralist and phenomenological approaches to language. In particular, I would like to argue that inner form enabled the conceptual development and refinement of a new, structural-phenomenological concept of expression. Obviously, such an argument relies on two broad premises, namely a) that phenomenology and structuralism are at least potentially converging frames of thought and b) that they share a common concern for the notion of expression or expressivity. While not unproblematic, both these claims have been defended extensively in the recent past.1 As such, my point here will not be so much to defend either the idea of a general, productive convergence of structuralism and phenomenology or of the importance of the concept of expression in that process, as, much more specifically, to highlight contrastively the link between Špet’s, Jakobson’s and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of inner form and their respective conceptions of expression. This exercise, I contend, will itself clarify the original meaning and status given to expression or expressivity in their respective conceptions of language and demonstrate the genetic importance of inner form to the articulation of a new, structural-phenomenological conception of expression.
5As mentioned, the concept of inner form can be traced back to Humboldt, where it is defined as a “mental organisation” (geistige Eigenthümlichkeit), i.e. a “semantic constitution causing a different organisation of the lexical and grammatical meanings in every language” (Di Cesare 1998: 85). Although it is a notion that “has occupied a central place in research on Humboldt” and is undoubtedly a defining aspect of his conception of language, “the term ‘inner form’ (of) (German innere Form or innere Sprachform) only appears in one of Humboldt’s writings, albeit in the famous extensive introduction to his treatise on the Malayo-Polynesian Kawi, where the term is used eleven times” (Willems 2016: 1). The first observation to be made about inner form in Humboldt’s thought, in other words, is that there is a clear discrepancy between the explicit, critical attention Humboldt afforded the notion on the one hand, and the importance given to it by commentators in their systematic interpretation or reconstruction of his thought on the other.
6There are at least two plausible, and highly relevant, explanations for this state of affairs. First, as Willems judiciously underlines, inner form is not “a property of language that stands on its own, but rather the contrary” (Willems 2016: 1): it is intimately connected with the corresponding notion of outer form of language, with which it constitutes the form of language in a more general sense. For Humboldt, inner form is a concept that serves to qualify the idea of form and to weaken or complexify its contrast with or opposition to the notion of “content”. Through his distinction between inner and outer form of language, Humboldt attacks the idea that language can be reduced to its specific organisation as a sound system, as a set of arbitrary or conventional verbal “forms” (i.e. lexemes) whose meanings derive only from their conventional relation to externally constituted “contents”, i.e. to concepts or to objects of the real world. Because inner form provides language with its own semantic structure, its distinct way of shaping “content” and expressing objective meanings, each and every language reflects the objects of the world in a different way, framing them in a different world view (Weltansicht).
7It is important to note, secondly, that the philosophical implications of Humboldt’s theory of inner form are not a product of his recourse to the concept, but the very reason for using it in the first place. Inner form stems from Humboldt’s anthropologically grounded, kantian (or more specifically herderian) belief that “each language has to be studied as a historical and cultural individual [...] which embodies a unique world view (Weltansicht)” (Willems 2016: 2). The fundamental aspect of Humboldt’s conception of language, in other words, is not the analysis of its formal structure as a combination of content, inner and outer form, but the philosophical idea, clearly expressed in his work Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihre geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechtes (Humboldt 1998 [1836]) that different languages (and different cultures) reflect and express reality in different ways. In this sense, one understands why he would choose to spend less time on a specific, technical aspect of his philosophy of language, namely inner form, than on arguing broadly for that philosophy as a whole.
8Roughly summarising the function of inner form in Humboldt’s thought, one can say that it appears as a technical solution to a profound, general insight, which is to seek to ground the semantic, expressive dimension of language not (only) in the external, objective contents it denotates or refers to, but (also) in its formal, verbal structure itself. Humboldt himself provides very little clarifications as to how exactly inner form allows language to structure its own meanings, focussing instead on his intuition that language has an intrinsic semantic dimension and that this property must therefore be philosophically acknowledged and theoretically accounted for.
9In a second phase of development, Humboldt’s notion of inner form is taken up by a number of psychologists or psychologistically-inclined thinkers, in particular Steinthal, Wundt, Potebnja, and Marty. Each in their own way – and often in critical reaction to each other –, these thinkers sought to develop inner form as a more precise concept and explanatory criterium grounded in psychology – or to be more precise, in various forms of psychology: Völkerpsychologie (Steinthal), empirical psychology (Wundt), Brentanian psychology (Marty), Herbartian psychology (Potebnja). As a result, the notion of inner form becomes quite polysemous in this new phase:
For Wundt the “inner form” is a formative power and the psychical correlate of the “outer form”; ‘meaning’ would be a less ambiguous name for it.
All these old connotations of “iinner form” – and some other besides – survive, so that the term still has with almost every author a different sense. Morsbach: trend or spirit of a language; Sapir, opposite of “formlessness”; William Stern and others: “meaning”.
Finally, Anton Marty connects a totally different meaning with the term. In his writings, the “inner form” does not belong in the realm of meaning, but of form, his definition for form being: means of expression. A trace of his conception may be found incidentally in Humboldt, but essentially he is opposed to Humboldt and Steinthal, as well as to Wundt. All of these he characterizes as “nativists”, while he calls his own system an “empirical-teleological” one. (Leopold 1929: 255-256).
10For all the very significant differences betwenn Steinthal’s, Wundt’s, Potebnja’s, or Marty’s conceptions of inner form, there is also an obvious continuity or transversality in their approaches. The variations or divergences in their interpretation of inner form concern essentially the latter’s detailed mechanisms in the context of their varied conceptions of psychology. The broad functional role of inner form, however, is remarkably stable: in keeping with Humboldt’s initial intuition, it serves to explain the semantic property of linguistic form, its intrinsic and defining capacity to express and condition meaning. Moreover, while one finds many differences in the respective conceptions of psychology defended by Steinthal, Wundt, Potebnja or Marty, they all frame the question of inner form in terms of the relation between two clear instances, mind (or thought) and language. Inner form, in all these psychologies, describes the mechanisms through which mental representations or meanings are expressed or materialised in language, itself understood as a medium or phenomenon that has the obvious, unquestionable power to affect and shape these representations.
11Summarising again, one can highlight the strong functional continuity of the notion of inner form in its “psychological” phase: as was the case in Humboldt’s conception, it serves mainly as an explanatory factor for the inherently semantic dimension of language (or linguistic form). Interestingly, although a much more detailed account and analysis of its mechanisms is provided by Steinthal, Wundt, Potebnja or Marty, its functional role as a link or intermediary factor between (linguistic) form and (mental) content remains both its defining and its unifying feature. In other words, the general tripartite distinction between an outer form, a content, and an inner form that binds the former two is fully maintained when moving from Humboldt’s anthropologically grounded, philosophical conception of language, to the psychological or psycholinguistic paradigm defended in various forms by Steinthal, Wundt, Potebnja or Marty.
- 2 Špet is commonly to referred to as Russian, although he was born and studied in Kiev, Ukraine, an (...)
12The Russian2 philosopher Gustav Špet (1879-1937) is less of a household name in the history of the language sciences than the thinkers mentioned so far and requires therefore a short introduction. A student of Edmund Husserl, Špet not only introduced Husserlian transcendental phenomenology in Russia (cf. Haardt 1993; Dennes 1998), but provided a highly original reading of the philosophy of his master, in particular in Appearance and sense (1914). A frequent visitor of the meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, Špet was also an important interlocutor of Soviet linguists (Viktor Vinogradov, Grigorij Vinokur, Rozalija Šor, Roman Jakobson) and devoted one of his most significant studies, The inner form of the word: variations on a Humboldtian theme [Vnutrennaja forma slova, 1927], explicity to linguistics, Humboldt and the concept of inner form. Although he is often credited with having introduced the Moscow formalists, in particular Jakobson, to phenomenology (cf. Holenstein 1975; Winner 1987), it is worth keeping in mind that theoretical relations between them were often frought and involved frequent disputes, particularly on the subject of Potebnja (whose psychological theories of mental images the formalists fundamentally opposed) and his conception of inner form (cf. Šor 2016 [1927]; Flack 2016b).
13While there are of course competing accounts of the development and signification of Špet’s thought, it can be broadly construed as a correction of, or elaboration on, Husserl’s phenomenology through a hermeneutical prism that emphasises the historico-cultural and social processes of the constitution of meaning in experience (cf. Dennes 2006; Artemenko 2017; Bourgeot 2021). Špet was especially interested in phenomenology’s potential to steer a course between psychological and idealist or transcendental interpretations of consciousness. For him, the conscious subject is to be thought of neither as a product of material, psycho-physical mechanisms (or mental operations), nor as a transcendental subject in the sense of Kant, but as a historical and cultural instance engaged in an evolving, interpretative relation with its world. Much of the corrections Špet brought to Husserl’s phenomenology were thus directed both against what he (along with many other prominent phenomenologists) perceived as the latter’s “transcendental” turn in Ideen I, and towards a better account of phenomena such as language and art, where subjectivity is most clearly entangled with and engaged in its historical and cultural forms.
14One of the specific points on which Špet’s correction of Husserl’s phenomenology is most obvious and telling is his reinterpretation of the central notion of intuition. For Husserl, intuition can be characterised as “what gives me what is immediate, what is “given”. It is the medium in which reality impinges on my consciousness” (Hintikka 2003: 65), and is thus famously, the ultimate source of all our knowledge (cf. Husserl 1982 [1913], sec. 24). Crucially, Husserl distinguishes two different types of intuition: “straightforward” perceptual or sensible intuition on the one hand, “categorial” or eidetic intuition on the other (cf. Kidd 2014), the former corresponding to our naïve, unreflected experience of the world, the latter resulting from a conscious, methodological effort (through eidetic variation) to intuit the ideal essence or structure (Wesen) of given objects or state-of-affairs (Sachverhalte).
15To this binary Husserlian schema, Špet adds a third type of intuition, which he calls “intelligible” (intelligibilnaja) and which, according to Dennes “distinguishes itself as much from sensible intuition as from ideal intuition by the fact that it enables an enunciation of the lived experience of a concrete object through which the denomination of its essence is nonetheless conveyed” (Dennes 2006: 85, my translation). Thereby, Špet underlines how neither sensible nor ideal intuition on their own are satisfactory (or indeed possible stricto sensu as isolated acts), and that a full intuitive, originary act must of necessity involve a hermeneutic process of self-reflexion that synthesises the sensible and ideal moments of a given phenomena in an intuition that lets us “discover the unity of the object in its inner meaning” (Špet 1927: 196, my highlight).
16As Dennes has shown convincingly, Špet’s correction of Husserl’s phenomenology fundamentally informs his later work, which is focussed more specifically on the question of language: the triadic division between sensible, ideal and intelligible intuitions, according to her, is repeated in Špet’s appropriation of Humboldt’s distinction between outer form, content, and inner form (Dennes 2006: 84). Inner form, in other words, is mobilised in Špet’s theory of language as the linguistic pendant of intelligible intuition, as the aspect of language where sensible intuition (or the outer, concrete form of language) and ideal intuition (the content or meaning of language) merge into a single act or complex form, in which formal structure and conceptual meaning are synthesised. As such, language becomes for Špet a paradigmatic example of a hermeneutical act of intuition and of the way in which meaning can be concretised in historical and cultural form in experience.
17On the one hand, one cannot but notice the continuity of Špet’s use of inner form not only with Humboldt, but also with Potebnja, Wundt, and Marty – all of whom he discusses extensively. Both the role of inner form as a means to explain the intrinsically meaningful, semantic dimension of linguistic form, and its general position as an intermediary in a triadic structure between external form and objective meaning, are maintained. On the other hand, in a profoundly phenomenological move, Špet inverts the respective hierarchy of the three factors, giving the priority role to inner form, which is for him not only a technical feature or mechanism, but a primary correlate, the actual synthetic structure that our experience or intuition of language takes. For Špet, in particular contrast with the psychologistical phase of inner form, where it is situated between two instances, mind and language, whose distinct existence is posited and taken for granted, inner form represents the only truly given phenomena of language and thought: raw sensible intuition or phonetic form, just as pure eidetic intuition or meaning, are philosophical, analytical abstractions, they are mere moments or aspects which we in fact only experience in mediated fashion, in the complex hermeneutical mode of intelligible intuition.
18From the perspective of its relevance to phenomenology and structuralism, there are several interesting things to say about Špet’s conception of inner form. First of all, it is clear that, genetically, his thought is grounded and originates in phenomenology: as we saw, it is through a critical reflexion on Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Ideas I that Špet outlines his theory, and it is only at a later stage that he has recourse to a linguistic perspective. The concept of inner form, in his case, is introduced as a consolidation on the terrain of language of a much more general, specifically phenomenological theory of experience, consciousness and meaning (or sense). Language serves for Špet as an illustration and exemplification of his phenomenological concepts of meaning and experience, and the Humboldtian notion of inner form, reworked in particular by Potebnja and Marty, is their closest linguistic approximation or instantiation.
19Thereby, while Špet does not assimilate the tradition of inner form uncritically and contests many of the hypothesis of Potebnja, Wundt or Marty, it is also important to highlight that he provides no reflexion on the concept of inner form as a linguistic, let alone a structuralist concept: it is not inner form’s adequacy or potency as a criteria for linguistic (or structural) analysis that is relevant to him, but its usefulness as an expression of his general philosophy as a theory of language. To put it another way, one could say that Špet both discovers and reveals a phenomenological potential in the concept of inner form, which lies not so much in inner form’s concrete, detailed mechanisms, in the specific relation it establishes between linguistic form and meaning, but in the fact that form and meaning are necessarily correlated in language, and that language is thus by definition an expressive phenomena.
20Where all the thinkers mentioned until now devoted considerable amount of attention to inner form, giving it an explicitly central role in their theory, the same cannot be said of Roman Jakobson. For one, he did not devote much explicit attention to the notion, at least not in the form of articles, let alone a monograph, mainly dedicated to its exploration. When Jakobson does discuss inner form, moreover, he does so in link with Potebnja, and essentially in critical terms:
Potebnja is now for us [no more than] a series of relics. He considers a linguistic fact as thinking, and not as expression. In poetics, this led to distinguish between form and content, in linguistics to a wrong definition of meaning (quoted from Gindin & Man’kovskij 2007: 72).
21The opposition of Jakobson (and the Russian formalists) to Potebnja is well-documented (cf. Aumüller 2005; Fontaine 2006; Pilščikov 2017) and pertains of course to their radically differing conception of poetic language – which Potebnja understood as a sort of thinking in images, whereas the Russian formalists and Jakobson underlined the autotelic, autonomous nature of poetry and literature as a phenomena sui generis. As Pilščikov (2017) or Glanc (2003) have noted, Jakobson’s position vis-à-vis Potebnja was however not set in stone: in his Brno lectures he revised his negative evaluation of Potebnja, underlining instead the latter’s role as one of the main predecessors and sources of inspiration of formalism. This revision came along precisely with a renewed interest for the notion of inner form, such as it had, in particular, been interpreted by Andrej Belyj (cf. Flack 2016a).
22Be that as it may, the reason for including and discussing Jakobson here is that, for all the uncertainties or his contradictory statements about inner form, one does find it at the very heart of his theory of poetic language. It appears there, moreover, albeit in a very discrete, laconic way, with great consistency, from Jakobson’s early, groundbreaking writings (Jakobson 1921), to the famous summary provided in “Linguistics and poetics” (Jakobson 1960). Jakobson, indeed, associates inner form closely with the notion of the perceptibility of the sign, which, for him, is the signal feature of the poetic function of language: “In poetry the internal form of a name, that is, the semantic load of its constituents, regains its pertinence. ‘Cocktails’ may resume their obliterated kinship with plumage” (Jakobson 1960: 376).
23There are of course no easy interpretations of the precise theoretical implications of Jakobson’s brief mentions of inner form for his conception of language, especially in view of the complex relations he entertained not only with the legacy of Potebnja and its both antagonistic and productive reception in Russian formalism, but also to the treatment of inner form given by Špet and of course its importance for Marty, both thinkers who were relevant for Jakobson’s reception of Husserl and phenomenology. One can however distinguish three broad features:
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As is the case in all the other uses of inner form (Humboldt, Potebnja, Marty, Špet, etc.), it is connected to the semantic dimension of language, underlining here how Jakobson’s “formalist” approach remains sensitive to the aspect of meaning
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In keeping with the Humboldtian tradition, moreover, Jakobson’s use of inner form underlines how tightly that semantic dimension is connected to linguistic form itself, since it can be made the self-reflexive object of linguistic expression in its poetic mode (the poetic function of language increases the palpability of linguistic form, meaning here not only its verbal, acoustic features, but also its semantic one, or rather the tension between phonic and semantic aspects, between “sound” and “sense”, cf. Jakobson 1978).
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In strong contrast to all the foregoing theories, however, Jakobson’s conception of inner form is not opposed to outer form or content, given that Jakobson, following here the most radical teachings of Russian formalism, does not in fact accept of a clear distinction between between form and content.
24In contrast both to Humboldt and his psychologistic followers, in other words, Jakobson’s inner form clearly does not play the role of a bridging mechanism between language’s outer form and its objective meanings; in contrast to Špet, moreover, neither does it constitute an act of synthesis between the concrete form and the ideality of language. Rather, it simply represents the semantic aspect of what is taken to be the intrinsically expressive nature of linguistic form. Where Špet sees inner form as the correlate of an act of hermeneutical synthesis, Jakobson sees it as a functional aspect of language that can be isolated only analytically. For Jakobson, it is but another name to designate the inherent expressiveness of linguistic form.
25This does not mean, however, that what is a stake here is a mere terminological distinction between what we might want to term Jakobson’s functional and Špet’s synthetic conceptions of inner form. Rather, we are dealing with two radically different (though not unrelated) views of the nature of meaning in language. The synthetic nature of Špet’s approach implies that inner form serves as a bond between the artificial, conventional outer form of language (i.e. its phonetic or graphic realisations), and the significations that these forms express. For Špet, language is itself the historical process of binding given linguistic forms (words) with ideal signification through shared socio-cultural practice. As some of Špet’s followers have argued, that process, and thus the origin and development of the meaning of each world, can therefore be retraced through an etymological analysis of a word’s inner form (cf. Šor 1927). The functional approach of Jakobson, by contrast, interprets inner form as a pure artefact of linguistic or expressive form itself: both the acoustic aspect of language and the meanings it conveys are specifically linguistic phenomena, with no obvious or necessary links to the outer world. As Šor explicitly reproaches Jakobson, in his conception of language, expression is detached from pure signification, and inner form provides not a path back to objective meaning, but only to the expressive effects of language itself (Šor 1927).
- 3 Apocryphically, one has to wonder whether the notion of sign in Saussure is not an equivalent of (...)
26Another lingering question is whether the concept of inner form is still really operative in Jakobson’s functional model, as it has lost much of its initial characteristics in Humboldt (cf. Zenkin 2006: 67). Perhaps the easiest way to identify the impact of inner form in Jakobson’s functional model of language as a play of sound and meaning is to compare it with the Saussurean concept of sign and its interlocking aspects of signifier and signified. In Saussure’s binary model, the sign results from the straightforward combination of two aspects, a verbal form (i.e. arbre) and a mental image or concept, which famously are as inseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper (Saussure 1983: 111). To be more precise, for Saussure, a sign is not so much the product of the associative binding of a form and a concept than the producer of both signifier and signified through their institution by and in the sign as the terms of a mutual relation3. While Jakobson’s functional model follows Saussure in his idea that both verbal form and meaning are produced or instituted by language itself, he does not interpret the expressive sign as a straightforward, bidirectional binding between the two. Rather, through his concept of the poetic function, he underscores the schizophrenic nature of the sign (either “expression” or the “message” in Jakobson’s vocabulary), which not only institutes both verbal form and meaning in a mutually dependent relation, but also foregrounds itself (its own “palpability”) as the specific, expressive or “inner” form that produces signification.
27Without being too peremptory, one can thus interpret Jakobson’s approach, on the one hand, as taking up the triadic model of language of the tradition of inner form, and on the other hand as radicalising the conceptual process that is already discernable in Špet, namely the transformation of inner form as a bridge between outer form and content in language, to a synthesis of these aspects in a hermeneutical form of intuition, and finally to the very definition of the expressiveness of language as a phenomenon where form and meaning are not only correlated as the two sides of a coin, but primarily constitute expression itself. Evacuating the notions of outer form and content, Jakobson and the Russian formalists did not abandon inner form but rather identify it as the only real or possible mode of existence of language, the mode of concrete expression or expressivity.
28In contrast to Špet, it is worth highlighting that Jakobson’s reflexions around inner form are of an essentially linguistic nature. They are concerned with the description of a specific feature of language itself, namely its obvious capacity to be poetic or literary. Inner form (or language more generally), moreover, is not a notion or phenomena that is discovered as an exemplary confirmation of a philosphical intuition. Rather it serves for Jakobson as a starting point, one that is moreover strongly contested and modified, although arguably its central feature – the collapse of form and meaning into a single phenomena – is not only preserved by Jakobson, but radicalised. In this sense, Špet’s phenomenological and Jakobson’s structuralist path towards an expressive conception of inner form and of language are neither parallel nor convergent as such: they follow two unrelated logics and systematic concerns. Paradoxically, this double, uncorrelated role of inner form at the heart of both Špet’s and Jakobson’s conceptions of language thus seems to point to its importance as an unexpected point of convergences between phenomenological and structuralist methods and their progress towards a new conception of expression.
29To top off our exploration of the functional scope of inner form and to try and corroborate our hypothesis as to its importance to the development of a structural and phenomenological concept of expression, let us now turn to Merleau-Ponty. As was the case for Jakobson, inner form is obviously not a prominent concept in his work. But it does appear, again as was the case with Jakobson, at a very strategic location, namely in the summary exposition he makes of his phenomenology of language:
The speaking power the child assimilates in learning his language is not the sum of morphological, syntactical, and lexical meanings. These attainments are neither necessary nor sufficient to acquire a language, and once the act of speaking is acquired it presupposes no comparison between what I want to express and the conceptual arrangement of the means of expression I make use of. The words and turns of phrase needed to bring my significative intention to expression recommend themselves to me, when I am speaking, only by what Humboldt called innere Sprachform (and our contemporaries call Wortbegriff), that is, only by a certain style of speaking from which they arise and according to which they are organized without my having to represent them to myself. There is a “languagely” meaning of language which effects the mediation between my as yet unspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought. Organized signs have their immanent meaning, which does not arise from the “I think” but from the “I am able to.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 88)
30This extract is all the more significant, in the perspective pursued here, because it comes right at the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s “On the phenomenology of language”, in a section where the French phenomenologists discusses the views of several authors, in particular Husserl, Saussure, and Hendrik Pos, in relation to his conception of language. To be more precise, Merleau-Ponty mobilises there concepts by Husserl, Saussure, Pos and Humboldt to underpin his own views, whose origins, as is widely known, stem not from his reflexions specifically on language, but rather from his more general phenomenological exploration of perception. In that sense, Merleau-Ponty very clearly projects the linguistic ideas of Saussure, Pos and Humboldt unto his theories, or rather, he applies his own, very specific reading to their concepts.
31With this in mind, the most obvious thing to say about Merleau-Ponty’s attitude to the tradition of inner form is that it is in strong contrast to the acute historical awareness and readiness for engagement with the ideas of predecessors which one find in Marty, Špet, and indeed Jakobson. In that sense, his understanding of inner form can be seen as still Humboldtian, as a general quality of language’s inherent semantic autonomy, not as a detailed account, be it psychologistic, phenomenological or formalist, of its implications. As in the quote above, Merleau-Ponty seems to reduce inner form to the notion of style, that is to the subjective, individual deformations one brings to language when using it, and thus as an explanation for the Saussurean relation between langue and parole. In short, the only truly operative references for Merleau-Ponty are Husserl and Saussure, or to be somewhat less harsh, these two references seem to fondamentally condition his reading of the alternative sources (Pos, Humboldt, etc.) he is aware of.
32This superficiality of Merleau-Ponty’s knowledge of the tradition of inner form on the one hand, of his predecessors in the phenomenology of language on the other, is all the more interesting given that, as has been argued repeatedly (Coquet 2007; Leistle 2018; Stawarska 2013), he is otherwise one of the most consequent continuators of the tradition of jointly structural and phenomenological approaches to language. In particular, one can mention here his work on expression and expressivity, a notion which he generalises from its Husserlian and Jakobsonian (and through another genealogy, Cassirerian and Bühlerian) developments in the theory of language to the field of experience (cf. Kristensen 2010; Flack 2011; Alloa 2013). Merleau-Ponty’s importance as a continuator of Saussure, Husserl, but also Jakobson, might thus lead us to conclude that the importance of inner form waned with the crystalisation of truly structuralist and phenomenological approaches. But, paradoxically perhaps, it is precisely the paucity of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the notion of inner form and its operative effects in the new theories of language gradually put forward by Marty, Husserl, Špet, and Jakobson that reveals its importance in the development of structural and phenomenological approaches to language.
33As suggested, Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Humboldt is in essence Saussurean: the inner form corresponds to the subjective appropriation of langue by a speaking subject through the application of specific style of parole. Thus, while Merleau-Ponty does have a very strong sense of the expressivity of language, of its verbal quality, he displaces that property clearly on the side of the subject, who is condemned, so to say, to constantly and creatively reapproriate language and the world. To be more precise, expressivity, rather than being a truly immanent property of language, of the objective constitution of meanings, becomes for Merleau-Ponty a property of an expressive, bodily subject, not unlike the transcendental subject of Husserl. Instead of thinking expressivity in pure structural terms, as the self-organisation of linguistic or perceptive systems in acts of bodily intentionality, Merleau-Ponty is condemned to reduce it to a moment of subjective stylisation, a certain way of engaging with the world by also distancing oneself from it.
34As Emmanuel Alloa has pointed out, the double movement of appropriation and distance (or écart) that is typical of Merleau-Ponty’s description of our expressive relations with both language and the world, is tied strongly to his conception of meaning as an essentially diacritical, differential phenomena (Alloa 2013). Here again, Merleau-Ponty’s esssential inspiration is Saussure and his definition of the sign, not in any form the Humboldtian notion of inner form. Instead of thinking of expression as an inherent form of organisation, as a properly structural or structuring factor, Merleau-Ponty reduces it to pure opposition, to a constant system of «referrals» or renvoi (cf. Kristensen 2010). Merleau-Ponty’s shallow reception of the tradition of inner form correlates here with a misunderstanding of Jakobson’s notion of poetic function and of the intrisinc expressivity of linguistic form. Similarly, while Merleau-Ponty (indirectly) follows Špet’s intuition that all experience has a fundamentally hermeneutic or expressive structure, he seems to fail in his attempt to give a true objective foundation to his concept of expression: instead of corresponding to the sedimented forms of intersubjective cultural processes (as is the case in Špet), Merleau-Ponty seems to rely on an incessant subjective reappropriation of institutionalised meanings.
35The considerations provided here, I believe, showcase the importance of inner form as a fundamental element in the historical convergence of structuralism and phenomenology on the question of linguistic form, meaning, and expression. Additionally, I believe they have also brought satisfying answers to the questions we raised in the introduction.
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What allows inner form to function as a bridge between phenomenology and structuralism is its definition of linguistic form as intrinsically semantic, a property which requires both a structuralist concept of expressive form, and a general, phenomenological theory of experience as expressive.
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Inner form is both a symptom and a catalyser of phenomenological and structuralist approaches to language, as it functions all at once as an orientation point, a possibility, and as the logical result of trying to look for an explanation to the Herderian/Humboldtian question of the specific expressivity of different langages.
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The concrete contribution of inner form is its capacity, by introducing a mediatory element between form and content, to weaken the opposition between the two and to highlight the primary nature of the mediatory layer as the real bearer of linguistic expressivity.
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Inner form is clearly not a necessary feature of structural-phenomenological theories, but it does seem to have been a crucial moment in their developments, and is much more than a survivance in the theories where it does appear: the historical blindness to its development in Merleau-Ponty is correlated with an obvious weakness in his conception of expression.
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There are both strong continuities, in particular in the general functional role of inner form between all theories and a very clear inflection of its meaning when employed by Špet and Jakobson. That new meaning is mostly lost on Merleau-Ponty, who imposes his own, Saussurean lense.