Lucien Tesnière

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Lucien Tesnière

Lucien Tesnière [ lyˌsjɛ̃ tεˈnjε: ʀ ] (born May 13, 1893 in Mont-Saint-Aignan , † December 6, 1954 in Montpellier ) was a French linguist and is considered the founder of the dependency grammar .

Live and act

Lucien Tesnière was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan , a town not far from Rouen . He learned Latin and Greek at a German school and, as a young man, went to England, Germany and Italy for a while. Later he enrolled at the universities of the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Leipzig , where he studied German until the outbreak of the First World War . After his mobilization for the French armed forces on August 12, 1914, he was sent to the front on October 15 of the same year. After his capture on February 16, 1915, he was interned in the Merseburg POW camp together with 4,000 other prisoners of various nationalities. He learned other languages ​​during his forty-month imprisonment and worked as an interpreter for the German authorities.

In 1924 he received a professorship at the University of Strasbourg . There he already worked on the essential basics of the dependency grammar. Due to financial difficulties resulting from the conflict between France and Germany, he was unable to publish. In 1937 he moved to the University of Montpellier . It was not until 1953 that he published his Esquisse d'une syntaxe structurale before he died in 1954. He achieved the greatest degree of popularity - not only in French linguistics - with his posthumously published work Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959). His ideas on dependent grammar are mainly used in the practice of language teaching and - recently - also in the field of computational linguistics . Tesnière's pioneering work on structural syntax also influenced text semantics and Charles Fillmore's case-frame theory, and were used by Algirdas Julien Greimas for his theory of structural semantics .

Example of a stemma

Works

  • Petite grammaire russian. Henri Didier, Paris 1934.
  • Course élémentaire de syntaxe structurale. 1938.
  • Course de syntaxe structurale. Renex, Montpellier 1943.
  • Esquisse d'une syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck, Paris 1953.
  • Elements of syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck, Paris 1959.
  • Elements of syntaxe structurale. 2nd revised and corrected edition. Klincksieck, Paris 1965. 5th print, foreword by Jean Fourquet , Klincksieck, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-252-02620-0 .
    • German translation: Basics of structural syntax. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-911790-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lucien Tesnière: Elements of structural syntax . John Benjamin, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 2015, ISBN 978-90-272-6999-7 , pp. XXXII (preface by translators Sylvain Kahane and Timothy Osborne).
  2. ^ Hans Jürgen Heringer: Lucien Tesnière: His life. In: Dependenz und Valenz. 1st half volume, pages 70-79. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 978-3110141900 . (Handbooks for Linguistics and Communication Studies (HSK), Volume 25.)
personal data
SURNAME Tesnière, Lucien
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French linguist; Founder of the dependency grammar
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Mont-Saint-Aignan
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1954
Place of death Montpellier