 For Dressler, language phenomena interact at different levels of linguistic organisation with more or less "natural" operations or states which might, however, lead to competition between them, so that an "ideal" state of the system is unlikely to be reached—which in turn may explain the usual grammaticalization channels in language change and language use.Therefore, Dressler coined the term 'polycentristic theory' of word formation in 1977, then in 1983 'polycentristic language theory'.Due to his science-theoretical interests, Dressler introduced a semiotic model (following Charles Sanders Peirce) into linguistic theory.