Lucien Tesnière (; May 13, 1893 – December 6, 1954) was a prominent and influential French linguist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13, 1893. As a senior lecturer at the University of Strasbourg (1924) and later professor at the University of Montpellier (1937), he published many papers and books on Slavic languages. However, his importance in the history of linguistics is based mainly on his development of an approach to the syntax of natural languages that would become known as dependency grammar. He presented his theory in his book Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Elements of Structural Syntax), published posthumously in 1959.Due to illness at the end of his life, Tesnière did not manage to see his central work published. The actual publication of Éléments was due in part to the work of friends, family (especially his widow), and former students of his. These admirers of the linguist ensured that the manuscript he left was organized and put into book form in the years after his death. In the book he proposes a sophisticated formalization of syntactic structures, supported by many examples from a diversity of languages. Tesnière died in Montpellier on December 6, 1954.
Many central concepts that the modern study of syntax takes for granted were developed and presented in Éléments. For instance, Tesnière developed the concept of valency in detail, and the primary distinction between arguments (actants) and adjuncts (circumstants, French circonstants), which most if not all theories of syntax now acknowledge and build on, was central to Tesnière's understanding. Tesnière also argued vehemently that syntax is autonomous from morphology and semantics, although his stance is different from generative grammar which takes syntax to be a separate module of the human faculty for language.
Biography Lucien Tesnière was born on May 13, 1893, in Mont-Saint-Aignan, now a suburb of Rouen (north-west of France). He studied Latin, Greek, and German in school, spent time abroad as a young man in England, Germany, and Italy.The biographical information here is an abbreviated version of the biography produced in the Translators' introduction to the English version of the Éléments. See Kahane and Osborne (2015). He was enrolled at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris) and the University of Leipzig studying Germanic languages when World War I broke out. He was mobilized on August 12 and sent to the front on October 15. He became a prisoner of war on 16 February 1915. He was interned in the camp at Merseburg with 4000 other prisoners from all nationalities. During his 40 months of captivity, he continued his intense study of languages. He also worked for the German authorities as a French-English-Russian-Italian-German interpreter.
He continued his studies at the Sorbonne after the war. He studied with Joseph Vendryes, and attended lectures at the Collège de France by Antoine Meillet, the most prominent French linguist of the first half of the 20th century. In 1920 Tesnière was invited as a lecturer in French to the University of Ljubljana (now the capital of Slovenia), where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the disappearance of the dual in Slovenian. He married Jeanne Roulier in Zagreb and fathered three children with her.
In February 1924, Tesnière became associate professor of Slavic language and literature at the University of Strasbourg, where he taught Russian and Old Slavic. Tesnière was promoted to professor of grammaire comparée at the University of Montpellier in 1937.
During World War II Tesnière worked as a cryptography officer for the Military Intelligence, the so-called Deuxième Bureau. He became very ill after the war in 1947 and his health remained poor until he died on December 6, 1954. His primary oeuvre, Éléments de syntaxe structurale, was then published five years later in 1959 due to the constant efforts of his wife Jeanne and the help of colleagues and friends. It was further revised and a second edition published in 1966.
Central ideas in Tesnière's conception of syntax
The following subsections consider some of the central ideas and concepts in Tesnière's approach to syntax. The following areas are touched on: (1) connections, (2) autonomous syntax, (3) verb centrality, (4) stemmas, (5) centripetal (head-initial) and centrifugal (head-final) languages, (6) valency, (7) actants and circonstants, and (8) transfer.
Connections Tesnière begins the presentation of his theory of syntax with the connection. Connections are present between words of sentences. They group the words together, creating units that can be assigned meaning. Tesnière writes:
"Every word in a sentence is not isolated as it is in the dictionary. The mind perceives connections between a word and its neighbors. The totality of these connections forms the scaffold of the sentence. These connections are not indicated by anything, but it is absolutely crucial that they be perceived by the mind; without them the sentence would not be intelligible. ..., a sentence of the type Alfred spoke is not composed of just the two elements Alfred and spoke, but rather of three elements, the first being Alfred, the second spoke, and the third the connection that unites them – without which there would be no sentence. To say that a sentence of the type Alfred spoke consists of only two elements is to analyze it in a superficial manner, purely morphologically, while neglecting the essential aspect that is the syntactic link."The passage cited here is taken from the first page of the Éléments (1966).
Tesnière calls the asymmetrical connections that he describes in this passage dependencies (Chapter 2), hence the term dependency grammar.Note that Tesnière never actually used the term dependency grammar to describe the theory of syntax he was proposing. That concept arose later in the 1960s as Tesnière's theory was being received and evaluated. Two words that are connected by a dependency do not have equal status, but rather the one word is the superior, and the other its subordinate. Tesnière called the superior word the governor, and the inferior word the subordinate.These key terms (governor and subordinate) are first presented in chapter 2 of the Éléments (1966:13]). By acknowledging the totality of connections between the words of a sentence, Tesnière was in a position to assign the sentence a concrete syntactic structure, which he did in terms of the stemma (see below).
Antinomy between structural and linear order Tesnière rejected the influence of morphology on the field of syntax.Tesnière states in chapter 15 that morphology and syntax are separate domains (1966:34]). In so doing, he was promoting a break from a tradition in linguistics that focused on concrete forms such as affixes and the inflectional paradigms associated with the study of the languages of antiquity (Latin and Greek). Tesnière argued that the study of syntax should not be limited to the examination of concrete forms, but rather one has to acknowledge and explore the connections (as just described above). He pointed to the key concept of innere Sprachform 'inner speech form' established by Wilhelm von Humboldt.Tesnière first mentions Wilhelm von Humboldt and innere Sprachform in chapter 1 (1966:13]). Since innere Sprachform (i.e. the connections) is abstract, one cannot acknowledge it and explore the central role that it plays in syntax by focusing just on concrete forms. Tesnière was arguing, in other words, that syntax is largely independent of morphology.
Tesnière also saw syntax and semantics as separate domains of language. To illustrate this separation, he produced the nonsensical sentence Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite 'The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail'.This nonsensical sentence is discussed in chapter 20 (1966:40-42). He emphasized that while the sentence is nonsensical, it is well-formed from a syntactic point of view, for the forms of the words and their order of appearance are correct. Noam Chomsky later made the same point with his famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.Note that Tesnière died in 1954, whereas Chomsky's famous sentence appears in his book Syntactic Structures (1957:15).
Although both Tesnière and Chomsky argue for 'autonomy of syntax', their concepts are quite different and should not be confused with one another. The central issue is in language cognition which is elementary for Chomsky who claims that syntax is an innate psychological phenomenon. In contrast, Tesnière's concept of autonomy of syntax, or antinomy between structural and linear order, is fully non-psychological. Tesnière's grammar is not meant to be taken as a theory of language, but as a tool for linguistic analysis. Tesnière argues for a one-way link from meaning to expression:“When we speak, our intent is not to find meaning afterwards in a pre-existing string of phonemes, but rather to give an easily transmissible form to a thought that precedes the form and which is its sole raison d’être”Tesnière's concept of language is based on the idea that the meaning of a sentence resides on a semantic plane which is two-dimensional (nonlinear). The sentence, on the other hand, belongs to the expression plane which is one-dimensional (linear). When nonlinear meaning is forced into linear form, its structure will have to break. The outcome does not reflect logic or psychology, but brute necessity. Tesnière's grammar is the semantic, nonlinear analysis of the linear sentence form.
Verb centrality Tesnière argued vehemently against the binary division of the clause into subject and predicate that was and is prevalent in the study of syntax, and he replaced this division with verb centrality.Tesnière discusses the binary division and verb centrality in chapters 48-49 of the Éléments (1966:102-105). He stated that the division stems from logic and has no place in linguistics. He positioned the verb as the root of all clause structure, whereby all other elements in the clause are either directly or indirectly dependent on the verb. Tesnière illustrated the distinction with the diagrammatic representations (stemmas) of the French sentence Alfred parle lentement 'Alfred speaks slowly' and the Latin sentence Filius amat patrem '(The) son loves (the) father':The following two stemmas are from chapter 48 of the Éléments (1966:102).
The diagram of the French sentence above illustrates the binary division that Tesnière rejected; the clause is divided into two parts, the subject Alfred and the predicate parle lentement. The Latin sentence below illustrates the verb centrality that Tesnière espoused; the verb amat is the root of the clause and the subject filius and the object patrem are its dependents. The importance of this distinction resides with the overall understanding of sentence structure that arises from these competing views. A theory of syntax that starts with the binary division is likely to become a phrase structure grammar (a constituency grammar), whereas a theory of syntax that starts with verb centrality is likely to become a dependency grammar.
Stemmas Tesnière relied heavily on tree-like diagrams to represent the understanding of sentence structure and syntax that he was pursuing. He called these diagrams stemmas - the Éléments contains over 350 of them. These stemmas show the connections and the manner in which the connections link the words of sentences into a hierarchy of structure, e.g.The two examples given here are the English translations of the French originals. A majority of the stemmas Tesnière produced were (of course) of French sentences and phrases, (since Tesnière was a Frenchman).