Gustave Guillaume

Persondata
NAME=Guillaume, Gustave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=French linguist, philologist and Volney Prize laureate
DATE OF BIRTH=1883
PLACE OF BIRTH=-1960
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=

Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), is a French linguist, philologist and Volney Prize laureate.Guillaume developed an original theory of human language little known in the English speaking world but important in the French-speaking world, particularly in Quebec. Introduced to linguistics by the great comparatist Antoine Meillet, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure, he became well versed in historical studies and the comparative method and adopted its mentalist tradition and systemic view of language. In his first major publication, "Le problème de l’article et sa solution dans la langue française" (1919), he set out to apply the comparative method to the uses of the articles in Modern French in order to describe their mental system hidden not in pre-historical time, but in the preconscious mind of the speaker.

He did not succeed – it was to take him more than twenty years to discern the system of the articles – but in 1929 with "Temps et Verbe" he did succeed in describing how the systems of aspect, mood and tense operate to produce an image of time proper to the event expressed by a verb in a sentence. This major breakthrough gave him a first view of the mental system – the “psychosystem”, as he later called it – of the verb and made him realize that, as a part of speech, the verb is a system of systems available to the speaker to construct a verb each time one is required during the give and take of ordinary discourse. From that point on in his career, he tried to analyze how words of different types are constructed – attempting to discern the grammatical systems involved in configuring a word’s lexical import to give rise to the parts of speech observed in French and other
Indo-European languages.

This breakthrough led Guillaume to the even more important conclusion that linguistics involves far more than analyzing how we understand what we hear and read. He realized that it is essential to adopt the point of view of the speaker and this involves far more than just pronouncing words and linking them together to form a sentence: “To study a language in circumstances as close as possible to the real circumstances of usage, one should, like a speaker, start with the language in a virtual state and trace how the speaker actualizes that virtuality.” (Temps et Verbe, p. 121) That is, before we can say any word to express the specific experience we have in mind, we must call on the mental potentialities acquired with our mother tongue to represent this experience by forming the word’s meaning, both lexical and grammatical, and to actualize its physical sign. This realization confirmed his initial postulate that language consists of langue and discours, “tongue” and “discourse”, understood as an operative, potential-to-actual binary, and not as a static dichotomy like Saussure’s langue and parole.

Guillaume’s constant concern to analyze words brought him to view each word type or part of speech as the means of incorporating into words themselves certain syntactic possibilities to be deployed in the sentence. The challenge this poses for a linguist is to find the means of analyzing the preconscious mental operations, the “psychomechanisms” as he called them, giving rise to each part of speech. This in turn led him to examine languages where words are not formed in this way and in his last years to suggest the bases for a general theory of the word, or as he used to say, the vocable, to avoid the danger of foisting the Indo-European type of word onto languages of a very different type.

Throughout his teaching career, from 1938 to 1960 at the École pratique des hautes études, Guillaume wrote out his, usually bi-weekly, lectures. These, along with various research notes and essays, make up some 60,000 manuscript pages kept in the Fonds Gustave Guillaume at Laval University in Quebec City. To date, 20 volumes of these documents have been published (Presses de l’Université Laval). The only volume of Guillaume’s writings translated into English is Foundations for a Science of Language, a series of excerpts from various lectures and essays, the first of which, from his inaugural lecture of 1952-1953, begins as follows:

“Science is founded on the insight that the world of appearances tells of hidden

things, things which appearances reflect but do not resemble. One such insight is

that what seems to be disorder in language hides an underlying order – a wonderful

order. The word is not mine – it comes from the great Meillet, who wrote that ‘a

language involves a system where everything fits together and has a wonderfully

rigorous design.’ This insight has been the guide and continues to be the guide of

the studies pursued here.” For a brief introduction to his theory in English, see The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, and for a more lengthy introduction, see Language in the Mind. For the detail of all publications of Guillaume, as well as a bibliography of articles and volumes inspired by his theory, see the site of the Fonds Gustave Guillaume: www.fl.ulaval.ca/fgg/

The Association international de Psychomécanique du langage (AIPL) organizes an international conference every three years for scholars influenced by Guillaume’s approach to language. [http://www.psychomecaniquedulangage.org/]

References

Gustave Guillaume, Foundations for a Science of Language, John Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1984.

John Hewson, "Gustave Guillaume" in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, ed. by Keith Brown, Vol. 5:169-170 (2004).

Walter Hirtle, Language in the Mind, McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal, (2007).