These ideas constitute the framework of Potebnja's master's thesis, On Some Symbols in Slavic Folk Poetry (Russian: О некоторых символах в славянской народной поэзии, 1860; expanded edn 1914), and his monumental work Obiasneniia malorusskikh i srodnykh narodnykh pesen (Explanations of Little Russian and Related Folk Songs, 2 vols, 1883, 1887).

Potebnia's principal works on this subject were published posthumously: From Lectures on the Theory of Literature: The Fable, the Adage, the Proverb (Russian: Из лекции по теории словесности.

Regarding language as an individual's or a nation's only possible means of perceiving the world and of thinking, Potebnja protested vehemently against denationalization in general and the Russification of Ukrainians in particular, and equated this process with spiritual and intellectual disintegration.

Potebnja's philosophy of language is rooted in Wilhelm von Humboldt's romantic idealism, but he was also influenced by J. Herbart's and Hermann Lotze's associative psychology, and particularly by Heymann Steinthal's psycholinguistic writings.

He made many discoveries in Ukrainian historical phonetics, such as the primordial dž < dj alteration, the so-called second pleophony, and the conditions for the alternation e:o.

As an etymologist, Potebnja paid much attention to semantic development and the history of words against an expansive historical, folkloric, and psychological background.

His major etymological writings were collected in K istorii zvukov russkago iazyka (Toward a History of the Sounds in the Russian Language, vols 2–4, 1880–1, 1883).

Before his work the field of Slavic historical syntax consisted mostly of inventories of constructions collected from literary monuments of various periods.

He revised it to create a broadly drawn picture of category and construction changes tied to changes in ways of thinking, by integrating historical, dialectal, and folkloric materials.

His ideas on literature were adopted as a theoretical framework by the ‘Kharkiv school’ (B. Lezin, Vasyl Khartsiiev, A. Gornfeld, T. Rainov, Oleksa Vetukhiv, and others) grouped around the serial Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva (8 vols, 1907–23).