“Campo lessicale vs campo semantico: un miraggio metalinguistico?"

This paper deals with the synchronic parallel use of the terms lexical field and semantic field. In most contemporary Dictionaries of Linguistics, the two concepts are not distinguished, they are tagged as synonyms. However, if we observe their use from the beginning of field theory, we can see that their meanings were intended to be very different. Our intent is to propose a reading of the principal texts by Jost Trier, the founder of field theory in order to highlight the conceptually different positions we find behind the denominations Wortfeld and Bedeutungsfeld, i.e. the two German original definitions. The word field was coined in 1924 by Gunther Ipsen and adopted by Jost Trier 1931 in his field theory, although the concept of the field itself goes back to A. von Humboldt, who said “die Gliederung ist das allgemeinste und tiefste Merkmal aller Sprache”. The new view enables us to realize what Trier really meant and how the different denominations received a new or distinct meaning in the subsequent development of the theory (from Weisgerber to Coseriu, from Porzig to Minsky). What actually changed was the conceptual idea of the field, which for Trier, as for von Humboldt, indicated the possibility to implement a pure concept (Sinn) through a sign, but which was already in Ipsen and Porzig a level for the description of semantic relations.