Lucien Tesnière (French: [lysjɛ̃ tɛnjɛʁ]; 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. 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. 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." Tesnière calls the asymmetrical connections that he describes in this passage dependencies (Chapter 2), hence the term dependency grammar. 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. 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).
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