The present article discusses the semantic structure of adverbial compounds (avyayībhāva) in Sanskrit as presented in the earliest grammatical sources. On the one hand, it shows the shift in their description from the formal approach presented by Pāṇini to a semantic one found in his commentator’s – Patañjali’s work. On the other hand, it tries to determine whether adverbial compounds are semantically a mere combination of their parts or perhaps other factors, such as context, play a role in their semantics.
While the Gestaltists worked on music perception, lack of attention to poetic language is striking. Indeed, there was no “gestalt linguistics” until the term began to be used in the 1990s (Petitot, Wildgen, Brandt). True, the Vienna psychologist Karl Bühler wrote on language. However, his orientation was opposed to Berlin in ways that actually divide along the question of the immediacy of images (Berlin) and the act of judgment of language (Vienna). One could make the larger point that the original Gestaltists never dealt with symbolism, signs and semiotics.
Stories are sequences of events that, in contrast to the continuous flow of life, have a clear beginning and end. They imitate life without repeating it exactly. The fact that stories subject fundamental complexes of life to specific processing is illustrated by the feature film ‘The God of Carnage’ (Polanski, 2011). The morphological analysis of the filmed play is framed by a presentation of methodological guidelines for exploring the experience of stories and a subsequent discussion of the added value of stories in the context of contemporary culture.
The article profiles Wilhelm Salber’s concept of the unit of action (Handlungseinheit) as a morphological–Gestalt-psychological approach to “natural” process forms in everyday life, exemplified by sport. In contrast to classical action-psychological functional models (goal orientation, control-loop models, feedback), action is conceived as a tension-laden movement of form, aligned with core ideas from Gestalt psychology and Lewin’s field theory. Theoretically, the four traits of the unit of action—Unification, Stundenwelt (a situated experiential “hour-world”), Werdeform (form-of-becoming), and Durchformung (pervasive shaping)—are elaborated and interwoven with the conditions of psychic form formation (metamorphosis of meanings, historization, practice/Einübung, organization, constitution/Verfassung, and the unit of action itself). Using endurance running as an example, the article shows how everyday stresses are transformed into a specific, present-oriented and immediate experience through the rhythmic figuration of the action of endurance running. This shows how transitions within units of action enable psychological self-regulation in everyday life, and how individual acts can be understood only with regard to the whole Gestalt. Methodologically, the article argues for descriptive- phenomenological procedures and discusses scope, operationalisability, and transferability to collective contexts. For sport-psychological practice, the approach affords added value: transitions, crises, and reorganizations within unfolding units of action can be purposefully accompanied and shaped.
Christian von Ehrenfels published his seminal paper Über Gestaltqualitäten in 1890, six years before becoming a professor of philosophy at the German University in Prague, where he would remain until 1929. He had attended Brentano’s lectures in Vienna (1879–80) and written his dissertation in Graz under the guidance of Meinong (one of Brentano’s most prominent students). Ehrenfels would later become a colleague of another pupil of Brentano (in Brentano’s Würzburg years, i.e. 1867–69), Marty, recruited by the same German University in Prague already in 1880, where he taught until 1913, devoting himself mainly to the philosophy of language.
