Lucien Tesnière

Lucien Tesnière [ ly ˌ sjɛ tεnjε: ʀ ] ( born May 13, 1893 in Mont -Saint -Aignan, † December 6, 1954 in Montpellier) was a French linguist and is regarded as the founder of dependency grammar.

In 1924 he received a professorship at the University of Strasbourg. He already worked out basic principles of Dependency. Due to funding difficulties that stemmed from the conflict between France and Germany, he could not publish. In 1937 he transferred to the University of Montpellier. It was not until 1953 he published his Outline of a syntaxe structurale before he died in 1954. The greatest level of awareness - not only in French Linguistics - he only gained his posthumously published work Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959). His ideas for dependency grammar are mainly used in the practice of language teaching and - also used in the field of Computational Linguistics - lately. Tesnières pioneering work on structural syntax also influenced the text semantics, and the case -frame theory of Charles Fillmore and were used by Greimas for his theory of structural semantics.

Works

• Petite grammaire russe. Henri Didier, Paris, 1934.
• Cours élémentaire de syntaxe structurale. In 1938.
• Cours de syntaxe structurale. Renex, Montpellier 1943.
• Outline of a syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck, Paris 1953.
• Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck, Paris 1959.
• Éléments de syntaxe structurale. 2nd, revised and corrected edition. Klincksieck, Paris 1965. 5th printing, foreword by Jean Fourquet, Klincksieck, Paris, 1988, ISBN 2-252-02620-0. German translation: Principles of structural syntax. Klett- Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-911790-3.