Vom Schrank und seinen Türen und einem Meer, das lachte: Aleksej Fedorovič Losevs interpretationistische Semantik

The paper deals with the semantic theory of interpretation of A. F. Losev in his early period up to 1930 as well as in his linguistic investigations in the 70’s and 80’s of the last century. In using a word or some grammatical category, a speaker already interprets some state of affairs. In a sense, all invariant meaning seems to be metaphorical, i.e. meanings are interpretations of the world. This theory is illustrated with some famous examples by Losev himself: Garden, cabinet, the sentence “The sea was laughing”. Reflecting about his garden and his cabinet Losev shows the difference and convergence of parts and the whole: trees, flowers or the cabinet’s doors on the one hand, and the garden or the cabinet as a whole on the other. These relations are related to the meaning of words. In his early works, especially in the Philosophy of the Name and the Dialectics of Myth, Losev sees in meaning a semantic cluster which develops within speech (in sentences, narrations or myths). The works of the late period investigate invariant meanings of words and grammatical categories in the sense of some interpretive force.