Abstract
Early Romantic language reflection had far-reaching consequences for the metaphor as a traditionally pre-eminent category within the theory of language. Pre-Romantic notions of the metaphor originated from the relationship of individual words and their respective meanings to each other, whereas Romantic language theory revealed the structural and systematic dimension of language. The comparison to the numerical system of mathematics anticipates de Saussure's differential functional mechanism of language that implies the presence of the entire language system in each of its elements. The Romantic notion of the sign undergoes a decisive modernizing revaluation that remains current, whereas, due to its conventional characteristics, the notion of the metaphor turns into a marginal category.
