 It is also of importance here to understand Marty’s concept of inner linguistic form. This concept had been introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in order to designate the total worldview (Weltanschauung) of a people who speaks the language in question and even tied with the notion of the spirit of a people (Volksgeist), but also with imagery that occurs in the usage of a language. While such notions as worldview and the spirit of a people play no role in Marty’s descriptive semasiology, he still finds it appropriate to designate the inner linguistic form (or “etymon”), understood as “a presentation which serves as a link of association between the outwardly perceivable sign and its meaning” (Marty 1884: 298), whether it be autosemantic or synsemantic. Outstanding examples of inner linguistic form are provided by the ideas behind various figurative expressions which are built into a language, e.g. “to give hand” and “to sweep an opinion aside”. Here images are called to mind, as can readily be confirmed by inner perception, and are useful in making us understand what is meant, without resorting to more complex expressions. In his later work Marty differentiated the figurative inner form of expression, as this has just been indicated, from the constructive inner form (Marty 1908, 144–150). Since our understanding of utterances in communication is a gradual process, outer expression of uncompleted utterances bring about certain accessory presentations which build expectation with regard to the whole meaning of the not yet finished utterances. Different languages, or, for example, different rhetorical styles and artistic means of expression use different typical forms of preparatory constructions of meanings. These preparatory presentations (inner constructive forms) bound with outer forms of partial expressions cannot be equated with the meaning of the utterance which appertains only to the whole expression once its utterance is finished. Though Marty was by no means unique among the linguists and philosophers of language after von Humboldt in making use of such a concept, he was also critical of many of his contemporaries, especially the nativists, who were, on his view, conflating the inner linguistic forms of expressions and their meanings. Such a conflation, he maintains, was already made by von Humboldt, for the worldview of a people who speaks a given language is more accurately identified with the meanings conveyed by applications of language and not with images or other inner forms which link these expressions with the meanings. Moreover, Marty finds some of his contemporaries, such as Berthold Delbrück, to be involved in a confusion between inner and outer linguistic form (i.e. the perceivable part of linguistic sign). This last point is also related to Marty’s efforts to argue that there is a distinction between a linguistic expression and its meaning. As obvious as this may be at present, some of Marty’s contemporaries wished to identify the two – perhaps as an after-effect of Schelling’s “identity philosophy” which Brentano had already laid to rest in Würzburg. Accordingly Marty’s semasiology is concerned with the complex unity (not identity) of “linguistic expression – inner linguistic form – meaning”.