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Lucien TesniereFrench linguist
Date of Birth: 13.05.1893
Country:  France |
Content:
Biography of Lucien Tesnière
Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954) was a French linguist. He was born on May 13, 1893 in Mon-Saint-Enene. He completed his studies at the Sorbonne in 1914 and spent a year in Germany in 1913, where he attended lectures by A. Leskien and K. Brugmann. From 1921 to 1924, he taught French in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. From 1924 to 1937, he was a professor of Slavic languages in Strasbourg, and from 1937 to 1954, he was a professor of comparative-historical and general linguistics in Montpellier. Tesnière passed away on December 6, 1954 in Montpellier.
Contributions
Most of Tesnière's publications during his lifetime were devoted to Slavic languages, including his work "Petite grammaire russe" (1934) and the Russian-French dictionary. In the last two decades of his life, Tesnière dedicated his work to a comprehensive study called "Elements of Structural Syntax" (lments de syntaxe structurale), which was published posthumously in 1959 (Russian translation in 1988). He viewed syntax as a distinct level of language description, intermediate between the linear surface order of elements and the semantic level. Tesnière's central concept in syntax was "syntactic dependency," which defined the relationship between words. He formulated the unconventional at the time, but later widely accepted, idea of the predicate as the center of a sentence, on which the subject also depends. According to Tesnière, the "verbal node" consists of the predicate ("verb"), obligatory dependent elements called "actants," and optional dependent elements called "circumstants." Different verbs have the ability to take different numbers of actants, and the ability of a verb to take actants is termed "valency," based on chemical terminology. Tesnière proposed a special metalanguage called the "dependency tree" to describe syntax. In his book, he also presented a variant of syntactic typology based on word order patterns in languages. As a language teaching practitioner, Tesnière emphasized the importance of teaching students syntactic analysis techniques, which sharply contrasted with the communicative approach.
