Gustave Guillaume
Gustave Guillaume (born December 16, 1883 in Paris , † February 3, 1960 ibid) was a French linguist . He developed the linguistic theory of psychomechanics .
Life
Guillaume came to linguistics as a lateral entrant: at the age of 26, as a bank apprentice in 1909, he met the renowned philologist Antoine Meillet , pupil and friend of Ferdinand de Saussure . In addition to finance, Guillaume appeared to Meillet to be competent in mathematics, physics, philosophy, as well as older and more recent literature, although he had never attended university. After discussions about language and grammar, Meillet invited Guillaume to attend his courses as well as those of other philologists at the École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France , where Guillaume learned about historical grammar and comparative language methods. In 1919 , Guillaume received his doctorate with a study of the problem of the article et sa solution dans la langue française (“The problem of the article and its solution in French”). Another publication followed in 1929 with Temps et verbe . On Meillet's initiative, he got a modest three-hour weekly teaching assignment at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1938 . There he taught until his death in front of an initially small, later growing audience. Gustave Guillaume died in Paris on February 3, 1960. His grave is in the Montparnasse cemetery .
Services
During his lifetime, Guillaume remained largely unrecognized. The essays that Guillaume published in scientific journals were either ignored or received harsh criticism. Apart from his teacher Meillet, scholars such as Louis Havet (1849–1925), Joseph Vendryes , Paul Imbs and Robert-Léon Wagner (who wrote a grammar of French in collaboration with Jacqueline Pinchon ) recognized his discoveries during his lifetime. However, your support has apparently not been enough to keep Guillaume's linguistics from being misunderstood. Guillaume's theory was still controversial in the 1970s .
reception
After Guillaume's death in 1960, his student Roch Valin inherited his 60,000-page manuscripts. After Valin's return to Canada, he became professor and head of the linguistic institute at Laval University ( City of Québec ). There Valin founded the Fonds Gustave Guillaume, a foundation that keeps the linguist's manuscripts. Over the course of his career, Valin has trained young French and English-speaking scientists on the methods of the psychomechanics of human speech. In 1964 Valin reissued Guillaume's out-of-print articles in Langage et science du langage . In 1971 he began to publish the courses held at the Ecole Pratique between 1938 and 1960, of which sixteen of the planned thirty volumes have appeared. Since 2003, the new series “Essais et mémoires de Gustave Guillaume” has been published under the direction of Valin's successor, Ronald Lowe . Among other things, Guillaume's two-volume work Prolégomènes à la linguistique structurale was reissued.
Not only linguists and grammarians have appreciated Guillaume's thinking. Other humanities scholars, such as the philosopher Paul Ricœur , also drew attention to psychomechanics early on. As early as the 1960s, another philosopher, Gilles Deleuze , pointed out the importance of Guillaume's work and called for people to "discover" it. Today, psychomechanics in linguistics is finding increasing resonance, both inside and outside the Francophone-speaking area. Linguists around the world are interested in this new trend in modern linguistics. In 2000, the German translation of an introductory collection of texts by Guillaume appeared under the title Basics of theoretical linguistics (French: Principes de linguistique théorique de Gustave Guillaume).
Works
- Guillaume, Gustave: Fundamentals of a theoretical linguistics . Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. ISBN 3-484-73050-1
- Guillaume, Gustave: Four Essays for a New Linguistics. With contributions by Robert-Léon Wagner, Roch Valin and Denise Sadek-Khalil. Edited by Pierre Blanchaud. Publishing house Dr. Kovac, 2006. ISBN 3-8300-2071-6
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gilles Deleuze: Différence et Répétition , 1968, p. 265.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Guillaume, Gustave |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French linguist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 16, 1883 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | 3rd February 1960 |
| Place of death | Paris |