Lucien Tesnière

Lucien Tesnière , born the May 13rd 1893 with Mount-Saint-Aignan and dead the December 6th 1954 with Montpellier, is a linguist French.

Professor with Strasbourg (1924), then with Montpellier (1937), it published work on the Slavic Langues, but it is especially known for its syntactic theory original, exposed in its posthumous book Éléments of structural syntax (1959), where it proposes a formalization of the syntactic structures of the Phrase, while being based on examples drawn from a great number of languages.

Its model rests on the Stemma , chart of the vertical and horizontal relations within syntactic constructions. In this representation, the Verbe is the element of hierarchical level more raised, it governs Complément S, which govern themselves of the subordinated elements, including the prone . The stemmas of Tesnière precede the syntactic trees of the Generative grammar, and its intuition that the Sujet (grammar) is not that an agent among others resounds with the assumption of a subject inside the SV. As of the first pages of its book Elements of structural syntax , it quotes the concept of in Sprachform (Wilhelm von Humboldt) to postulate which there exists an intangible structure underlying the visible structure of a statement. The transformationists will recognize there the concept of a Underlying structure (opposed to the Surface structure) in the Generative grammar.

Principal works

Small Russian grammar , Henri Didier, elementary Paris 1934.
Course of structural syntax , 1938.
Course of structural syntax , 1943.
Draft of a structural syntax , Klincksieck, Paris 1953.
Elements of structural syntax , Klincksieck, Paris 1959. ISBN 2252018615
Elements of structural syntax , Klincksieck, Paris 1988. Preface Jean Fourquet, professor in the Sorbonne. Re-examined and corrected 2nd edition, the fifth pulling. ISBN 2-252-02620-0

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