Reichling and De Groot: Two Dutch reactions to Bühler's Organon-Modell

Dutch structuralism developed during the first half of the 20th century as a heterogeneous movement. Interest in the works of Karl Bühler (1879–1963), however, can be observed in the publications of Dutch linguists as different as Albert Willem de Groot (1892–1963) and Anton Reichling (1898–1986), professors of General Linguistics at the universities of, respectively, Utrecht and Amsterdam. Although the ways in which they discuss and make use of Bühler’s insights differ widely, in agreement with their very divergent theoretical orientations, there is one common element: both scholars discovered and criticized, independently of each other, the same ambiguity in the famous organon-model, presented by Bühler in his Sprachtheorie (1934).