 Marty’s philosophy of language deserves our attention for at least two reasons. First of all, while his predecessors and contemporaries were for the most part concerned with the development of language through history, e.g. phonological and semantic change, Marty devoted much more attention to language as it is. In his own terms, his investigations concerning language were primarily descriptive rather than genetic. In contemporary terms, his focus was synchronic rather than diachronic. In this regard he was a precursor of structuralism (Kiesow 1990). The second reason why Marty’s philosophy of language is worth examining lies in the fact that in contrast to many others, who approached language as a product of either an alleged supra-human intelligence or lower psychological and physiological mechanisms such as association and reflex, he investigated language as something that arises from individual human minds as intentionally directed to objects. Not only does intentionality in the usual sense of consciousness of something become focal in Marty’s philosophy of language; he is also concerned first and foremost with language “in the sense of the purposeful manifestation of inner life through certain signs, especially through sounds and in particular those which – like most words of our spoken languages – are not intrinsically intelligible, but owe their significant power to custom and tradition” (Marty 1908a, 3). His emphasis here on purposeful manifestation (absichtliche Kundgabe) not only involves intention in the sense of the speaker’s communicative goal of evoking similar psychical phenomena as those expressed by linguistic signs in the hearer, but is also intention in the narrow sense of directedness toward intentional contents of expressed psychical phenomena (Formigari 2004, 162ff.; Cesalli, Mulligan 2017, 259 ff.). In this regard Marty was a precursor of yet another later movement in the study of language, namely intentional semantics (Liedtke 1990).