TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS OF “EXPRESSION GAPS” FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTEGRAL LINGUISTICS
TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS OF “EXPRESSION GAPS” FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTEGRAL LINGUISTICS

Summary/Abstract: Textual Functions of “Expression Gaps” from the Perspective of Integral Linguistics. This contribution proposes a critical-constructive examination of Eugenio Coseriu’s study “Die Ausdruckslücke als Ausdrucksverfahren (Textlinguistische Übung zu einem Gedicht von Kavafis) [‘Expression gaps as means of expression (Text-linguistic exercise on a poem by Cavafy’]”, which focuses on the role played by “expression gaps” in the constitution and articulation of textual sense. Of particular interest is a type of “objective omission” highlighted by Coseriu in his analysis of C.P. Cavafy’s “IN THE MONTH OF ATHYR”, which prompts the recovery and poetic exploitation of sequences posited as missing parts of a prior original text. The 1987 study is one of Coseriu’s detailed text analyses which, along with similar interpretive sketches from Textlinguistik (1981), provide significant clues for elaborating the conceptual framework of “text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense” envisaged in Coseriu’s work. In this case, we will argue that expression gaps in the definition proposed in 1987 can be included in a set of text-constitutive procedures, along with evocative sign relations, textual (including metaphorical) functions, and the forms of suspending incongruence and incorrectness on the basis of adequacy. Moving on to a more specific level of analysis, the role of triggering multiple layers of “de-subjectivation” or “objectivation” played by expression gaps, identified by Coseriu in his interpretation of Cavafy’s poem, can also be viewed as a device for the hierarchical articulation of sense-units in genuine texts considered as global signs. This warrants a reconsideration of expression gaps in the broader perspective of text typology, both from a functional and from a historical angle. The case is made by way of a parallel analysis of the Zen-inspired short story “The Ghoul-Priest” by Donald Richie, which evidences similar functions of expression gaps as devices for sense construction, thus attesting to the wider hermeneutic relevance of Coseriu’s (1987) interpretive suggestions.

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