Abstract

Merleau-Ponty's highly elusive conception of language and speech is critically developed, With stress on the guiding themes of (1) the continuity of meaningful speech with the spontaneous gestural capacity of the body; (2) the genetic priority of speech-Event to language-System; (3) the creative power of speech in organizing ontology and community. It is suggested that merleau-Ponty anticipated by several decades currents in the theory of language that are only now coming to full prominence in philosophical and extra-Philosophical literature on linguistic behavior