Joe Larochette and Eugenio Coseriu: connections around semantics and grammatical categories

The edition of three letters sent by the Belgian Romance scholar Joe Larochette (1914-2005) to Eugenio Coseriu (1921-2002) is preceded by an overview of the career of J. Larochette who, from a general linguistic point of view, also studied African languages, and by a contextualization of the scholarly contacts between E. Coseriu and J. Larochette. The latter was deeply influenced by E. Coseriu’s conception of synchrony, diachrony and history, by his views on grammatical categories, and by his distinction between ‘signification’ and ‘denotation’. Following the lead of E. Coseriu’s semantics, J. Larochette elaborated a theory of semantics extended towards the domain of text linguistics. The specific context of the three letters edited here was the planning of a colloquium of which one section was to be devoted to the problem of aspect and ‘aspectuality’ (grammatical and lexical aspect).