André Martinet

André Martinet (Saint-Alban-des-Villards, April 12, 1908 - Châtenay-Malabry, July 16, 1999) was a French linguist, representative of the current known as functionalism. In phonology, Martinet is perhaps Trubetzkoy's best and most faithful follower, whom he completes and corrects on different points.

He was, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson and Morris Swadesh, one of the founders of the International Association of Linguistics.

Biography

Associate professor of English, in 1937 he defended his two doctoral theses: Consonantal gemination of expressive origin in the Germanic languages and The phonology of the word in Danish. He was introduced to linguistics with the works of Otto Jespersen and the Circle of Copenhagen and in Paris he was a student of Meillet. Between 1932 and 1938 he learns the phonological theory of the Prague Circle and corresponds especially with Trubetzkoy; Likewise, he attends the birth of the glossematics of his friend Hjelmslev.

From 1938 to 1946 he was head of studies at the Escuela Práctica de Altos Estudios. He then directed the International Auxiliary Language Association in New York (1946-1948), where he contributed to the development of Interlingua. He taught at Columbia University, where he was appointed head of the department of linguistics (1947-1955) and was editor of Word magazine. There he assimilated the American behavioral school of Leonard Bloomfield.

In 1955 he returned to his post at the Escuela Práctica de Altos Etudes and held the chair of General Linguistics at the Sorbonne; At that time he composed his Economy of Phonetic Changes , (Berna, 1955), the first and so far the only great work of diachronic phonology. He was president of the European Society for Linguistics (1966-1999) and founded the International Society for Functional Linguistics and the journal La Linguistique.

Influenced by the Prague Circle, he founded the functionalist approach to syntax (Langue et Fonction, 1962). He is the author of about twenty important works on diachronic linguistics (the already cited Économie des changements phonetiques , 1955) and on General Linguistics. His best-known work, Éléments de linguistique générale (1960) has been translated into 17 languages and has influenced a whole generation of French linguists, and among the Spanish one can cite Vidal Lamíquiz as a student yours. He is also the author of Syntaxe générale (1985) and Fonction et dynamique des langues (1989). He has left an intellectual autobiography: Mémoires d'un linguiste, vivre les langues (1993).