Albert Sechehaye (; 4 July 1870,

Geneva Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Situa ...

– 2 July 1946, Geneva) was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland *Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri *Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia *Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports * Swiss Internation ...

linguist. He is known for editing

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 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 wide ...

's lectures, ''

Course in General Linguistics ''Course in General Linguistics'' (french: Cours de linguistique générale) is a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by historical-comparative linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Gen ...

''.

Biography

Sechehaye studied at the

University of Geneva The University of Geneva (French: ''Université de Genève'') is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin as a theological seminary. It remained focused on theology until the 17th centur ...

under Ferdinand de Saussure. From 1893 to 1902 he trained at

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

, where he wrote a thesis in German about the French

imperfect The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to ...

subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality s ...

. After that, he taught in Geneva until his death, though not becoming a professor until 1939, when he succeeded his colleague

Charles Bally __NOTOC__ Charles Bally (; 4 February 1865, Geneva – 10 April 1947, Geneva) was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a te ...

. His wife Marguerite Sechehaye was a psychotherapist and a pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenics.

Work

Sechehaye was influenced by the

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

Wilhelm Wundt Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and ...

and made contributions to

theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the ...

. He is credited by Pieter Seuren, historian of linguistics, as probably the first person to propose

formal grammar In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe ...

as a universally constrained system of meaning expression. Sechehaye was the first to use the term 'syntactic transformation' in its modern sense in his1908 ''Programme et méthodes de la linguistique théorique: psychologie du langage''.

Notes

References

*Anne-Marguerite Frýba-Reber, ''Albert Sechehaye et la syntaxe imaginative : contribution à l'histoire de la linguistique saussurienne'', Genève: Droz, 1994.

External links

* 1870 births 1946 deaths Structuralists Linguists from Switzerland {{Switzerland-linguist-stub