Gustave Guillaume (16 December 1883 – 3 February 1960) was a French
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and
philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...
, originator of the linguistic theory known as "psychomechanics". He was born and died in Paris.
Career
Guillaume was introduced to linguistics by the
comparative grammar
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic ...
ian
Antoine Meillet
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (; 11 November 1866 – 21 September 1936) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, the Swiss l ...
, a student of
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...
. He became well-versed in the historical and 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'' (The problem of the article and its solution in the French Language) (1919), Guillaume set out to apply the comparative method to the uses of the articles in Modern French, in order to describe their mental system located in the preconscious mind of the speaker rather than in pre-historical time. He was to pursue his research into the system of articles for the next 20 years.
In 1929, with ''Temps et Verbe'', he described how the systems of aspect, mood and tense operate to produce an image of time proper to the event that is expressed by a verb in a sentence. This breakthrough gave him a first view of the mental system – the "psychosystem", as he later called it – of the verb and led him to realize that, as a part of speech, the verb is a system of systems that the speaker can use to construct a verb each time it is needed during the give-and-take of ordinary
speech
Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...
. From that point on in his career, he tried to analyze how words of different types are constructed – attempting to identify the
grammatical systems involved in configuring a word's lexical importance, giving rise to the parts of speech observed in
French
French may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France
** French people, a nation and ethnic group
** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices
Arts and media
* The French (band), ...
and other
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
.
This led Guillaume to the conclusion that linguistics involves far more than analyzing how we understand what we hear and read. He decided that it was essential to adopt the point of view of the speaker, which would involve far more than 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'' (1929), p. 121] In other words, before we speak a 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'', "language"and "speech", understood as an operative, potential-to-actual binary, and not as a static dichotomy like Saussure's
langue and parole
''Langue'' and ''parole'' is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his '' Course in General Linguistics''.
The French term ''langue'' (' n individuallanguage') encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and ...
.
Guillaume's ongoing analysis of words led him to view each word type or part of speech as the means of incorporating certain syntactic possibilities into words themselves, 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.
Writings
Throughout his teaching career, from 1938 to 1960 at the École pratique des hautes
études, Guillaume wrote out his lectures, usually given twice a week. These, along with various research notes and essays, make up some 60,000 manuscript pages kept in the Fonds
Gustave Guillaume at
Laval University
Laval means ''The Valley'' in old French and is the name of:
People
* House of Laval, a French noble family originating from the town of Laval, Mayenne
* Laval (surname)
Places Belgium
* Laval, a village in the municipality of Sainte-Ode, Luxe ...
in
Quebec City
Quebec City is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Quebec. As of July 2021, the city had a population of 549,459, and the Census Metropolitan Area (including surrounding communities) had a populati ...
. 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. This observation 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."
Awards and recognition
Guillaume received the
Prix Volney (Volney Prize) from for work in comparative philology in 1917.
The Association international de Psychomécanique du language (AIPL) organizes an international conference every three years for scholars influenced by Guillaume's approach to language
Selected works
* Gustave Guillaume, ''Foundations for a Science of Language'', John Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1984.
See also
*
Université Laval
(; English: ''Laval University)'' is a public research university in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The university traces its roots to the Séminaire de Québec, founded by François de Montmorency-Laval in 1663, making it the oldest institutio ...
Notes
References
* 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).
Further reading
* For a brief introduction to Guillaume's theory in English, see ''The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', and for a more lengthy introduction, see ''Language in the Mind''.
* He heavily influenced the Welsh academic,
Bobi Jones
Robert Maynard Jones (20 May 1929 – 22 November 2017), generally known as Bobi Jones, was a Welsh Christian academic and one of the most prolific writers in the history of the Welsh language. A versatile master of poetry, fictional prose and cri ...
.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guillaume, Gustave
French philologists
1883 births
1960 deaths
20th-century French linguists
20th-century French philologists