Lucien Tesnière

Lucien Tesnière (May 13 1893 – December 6 1954) was one of the most prominent and influential French linguists.

Tesnière was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13 1893. Professor in Strasbourg (1924), and later in Montpellier (1937), he published many papers and books on Slavic languages, but his importance in the history of linguistics is based on his development of a syntactic theory known as dependency grammar, exposed in his book "Éléments de syntaxe structurale" (Elements of Structural Syntax), published posthumously in 1959, in which he proposes a sophisticated formalization of sentence syntactic structures, supported by many examples from a diversity of languages. Despite its profound influence on European linguistics, it remains untranslated into English. Tesnière died in Montpellier on December 6 1954.

Tesnière's model is based on the "stemma", a graphical representation of the grammatical dependencies between the words in a syntactic construction. In the sentence, the verb is seen as the highest level word, governing a set of complements, which govern their own complements themselves. Opposed to the logical notion of the division of the sentence into a subject and predicate, the grammatical subject in Tesnière's work is also considered subordinate to the verb (being, nevertheless, its "prime actant"), a notion which finds its echo in the VP-internal subject hypothesis in transformational syntax. Moreover, in the first chapter of "Éléments de syntaxe structurale", Tesnière adheres to Humboldt's notion of an 'innere Sprachform' which is not materially visible, making him a potential precursor to the opposition of "deep structure" and "surface structure" in generative grammar. While the notion of IP as the fundamental node of an utterance is foreign to Tesnière, his stemmae do remind one of the graphical representation in transformational syntax.

Main works

*"Petite grammaire russe", Henri Didier, Paris 1934.
*"Cours élémentaire de syntaxe structurale", 1938.
*"Cours de syntaxe structurale", 1943.
*"Esquisse d'une syntaxe structurale", Klincksieck, Paris 1953.
*"Éléments de syntaxe structurale", Klincksieck, Paris 1959. ISBN 2252018615
*"Éléments de syntaxe structurale", Klincksieck, Paris 1988. Preface by Jean Fourquet, professor at Sorbonne. Revised and corrected second edition. ISBN 2-252-02620-0