Jacques Damourette

Jacques Damourette (* 1873 ; † 1943 ) was a French Romance philologist and grammarian.

life and work

Damourette was a trained architect, but lived on a pension and did not work. In collaboration with his nephew Edouard Pichon (1890-1940) he began in 1911 at the age of 38 as a linguistic layman, the largest ever written French grammar, which was published in 7 volumes and an index volume on 4549 pages under the title Des mots à la pensée by 1956 . Essai de grammaire de la langue française (Paris 1927–1956, 8 vols. Paris 1968–1983) was published. Its value lies in the large number of analyzed examples from all centuries and stylistic levels, including contemporary spoken language, but is diminished by an esoteric terminology newly forged by the authors, which the user must first familiarize himself with.

Other works

• Traité modern de ponctuation, Paris 1939

literature

• Tradition grammaticale et linguistique. L'Essai de grammaire de la langue française de Jacques Damourette et Edouard Pichon, in: Travaux de Linguistique 9-10, 1982-1983
• Hélène Huot: Jacques Damourette (1873-1943) et Edouard Pichon (1890-1940), Des mots à la penséé. Essai de grammaire de la langue française, in: La grammaire française entre comparatisme et structuralisme, 1870-1960, ed. by Hélène Huot, Paris 1991, pp. 155-200
• Actualité de Jacques Damourette et Edouard Pichon, ed. by Henri Portine, in: Langages 124, 30, 1996
• De la grammaire à l'inconscient dans les traces de Damourette et Pichon, ed. by Michel Arrivé, Valelia Muni Toke and Claudine Normand, Limoges 2010