ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the idea of how one might relate Karl Buhler's work to ongoing and future work in the area of psychology with a particular focus on issues of human development embedded within a socio-cultural context. Buhler's work clearly has had an impact on subsequent work in the area referred to as pragmatics and subsequently functional linguistics. Buhler's discussion of the "field-theoretic approach" to language can be compared to themes in cognitive linguistics. For Buhler, as for cognitive linguists, language plays a central role in constructing the world. Buhler continually has been noted to have had tremendous impact on the field of pragmatics. Relating Buhler's work to more advances in the area of pragmatics and functional linguistics, one finds several points of further development. Modern day cultural and linguistic anthropologists have been fascinated with the connection between meaning and context, with quite a lot of focus on the role of deixis in the contextualization process.
