Henri Wittmann (born 1937) is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

from

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.

Biography

Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann was born in

Alsace Alsace (, ; ; Low Alemannic German/ gsw-FR, Elsàss ; german: Elsass ; la, Alsatia) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In 2020, it had ...

in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the

Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...

, he moved to North America and taught successively at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

, the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

in Edmonton, the

University of Windsor , mottoeng = Goodness, Discipline and Knowledge , established = , academic_affiliations = CARL, COU, Universities Canada , former_names = Assumption College (1857-1956)Assumption University of Windsor (1956-1963) , type = Public universi ...

and

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...

before teaching in the French university system of

, the

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières The Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) (''English: University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières''), also known as "l'université du peuple", established in 1969 and mainly located in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada, is a public universi ...

and at

Rimouski Rimouski ( ) is a city in Quebec, Canada. Rimouski is located in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region, at the mouth of the Rimouski River. It has a population of 48,935 (as of 2021). Rimouski is the site of Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR), t ...

as well as the

Université de Sherbrooke The University of Sherbrooke (French: Université de Sherbrooke) (UdS) is a large public French-language university in Quebec, Canada with campuses located in Sherbrooke and Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal approximately west of Sherbrooke. It i ...

. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

. In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at

Carleton University Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning Wo ...

in Ottawa. As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to the study of the

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

of a number of languages and language families: Pre-Indo-European,

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

( Hittite, Italic,

Romance Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings * Romance languages, ...

, Germanic, Creole), Afro-Asiatic (

Egyptian Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...

), African ( Mande, Kwa, Bantu), Austronesian ( Malagasy, Polynesian),

Amerindian The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the A ...

( Arawakan, Cariban). His work between 1963 and 2002 includes more than 140 items. He is a life member since 1962 of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

(LSA). In 1965, he cofounded with André Rigault and Douglas Ellis the Linguistics Department at McGill University. In 1981, he was the cofounder, with Normand Beauchemin and Robert Fournier, of the Linguistic Society of Quebec ( Association québécoise de linguistique) which he served for 10 years as president, secretary general and organizer of the annual meeting. In 1981 as well, he became the first Editor of the Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée, a responsibility he assumed for the following 20 years. Politically, Wittmann is known for his

anarcho-syndicalist Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence i ...

sympathies with strong links to the CNTU ( Confederation of National Trade Unions), communautary and anti-war movements. In 1974-1978, he was at the center of a union conflict at the University of Quebec which changed the landscape of collective bargaining in the academic world. A specialist of the linguistic heritage of Quebec, he also is a stout defender of Quebec independence.

Contributions to linguistics

Henri Wittmann is the first modern linguist to study non-standard forms of Quebec French (notably Joual,

Magoua Magoua (), which may derive from a word in Atikamekw: ''Makwa'' french: huard) which means ''loon'' (gavia immer), is a particular dialect of basilectal Quebec French spoken in the Trois-Rivières area, between Trois-Rivières and Maskinongé. ...

and Chaouin) in a theory-orientated and

comparative general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well ...

framework. In a general way, Wittmann, a student of André Martinet in the fifties,François Lo Jacomo (1985), ''Annuaire SILF'', Paris: Société internationale de linguistique fonctionnelle, page 68. has been the first to apply the latter's principles of

chain reaction A chain reaction is a sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place. In a chain reaction, positive feedback leads to a self-amplifying chain of events. Chain reactions are one way that sys ...

s in

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

to inflectional

. In Wittmann's view, the basic structure of the sentence is held together by functional items, with the

lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lex ...

items filling in the blanks. Position in functional space must maintain functional equidistance and disturbances in functional equidistance set off error correcting chain reactions that are cyclical in nature and subject to

drift Drift or Drifts may refer to: Geography * Drift or ford (crossing) of a river * Drift, Kentucky, unincorporated community in the United States * In Cornwall, England: ** Drift, Cornwall, village ** Drift Reservoir, associated with the village ...

. Thus, functionally salient lexical items will eventually set off a

push chain In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...

conveyor belt pressure in functional space, sending functionally close-by

affixes In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...

down the path of attrition. Such is the origin of

agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...

clitics of non-standard oral French from erstwhile lexical pronouns, setting off the attrition of functionally equivalent fusional means of inflection inherited from

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intellig ...

and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

: loss of suffixal inflection on the

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

, compensated by the rise of

proclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...

means indicating

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

and tense. Conversely, functional items going down the path of attrition leave behind functional gaps, triggering a drag chain effect on surrounding functionally salient lexical items. Such is the origin of the agglutinating prenominal class markers from erstwhile articles, which are compensated by the rise of postnominal means of expressing

definiteness In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those which are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical ...

on the noun. With the fulfilment of each cycle of change, a morphologically consistent phonological representation is realized and serves as input to the next cycle of morphological change. Those processes of inflectional renewal have parallels in recent neurolinguistic research, notably in the works by Gabriele Miceli. Wittmann's comparative approach to studying colonial varieties of French from Quebec, the Americas, and the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by t ...

reveals that the structural gap with written French is inherent in the variety of oral French reflecting the speech of

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

exported from the cities of northern France from the early 17th century onwards. The doubling of DP positions as agreement features and varying degrees of restrictions on verb movement are the only noteworthy developmental features that separate non-creole varieties from creole varieties of French. With his student Robert Fournier, Wittmann debunked within the same theoretical framework the extravagant African-origin hypotheses of Haitian Creole French by Claire Lefebvre and similar farfetched theories. In the end, neither the non-creole koine nor the creole varieties of colonial French turn out to be "creoles" in the sense that

creolist A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...

s would have it. They are both outcomes of "normal" processes of linguistic change and grammaticalization. Wittmann also contributed significantly to the study of other languages, notably languages that are claimed to be substratal to different varieties of Creole French ( Ewe, Yoruba, Mande, Bantu, Malagasy, Arawakan, Cariban).

References

Selected bibliography

* 1973. "Le joual, c'est-tu un créole?" ''La Linguistique'' 9:2.83-9

* 1973. "The lexicostatistical classification of the French-based Creole languages." ''Lexicostatistics in genetic linguistics: Proceedings of the Yale conference'', April 3–4, 1971, dir. Isidore Dyen, 89-99. La Haye: Mouto

* 1974. "Le projet du français parlé à Trois-Rivières I" ''Annales de l'Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences'' 41:3.165-74. (With Jean-Pierre Tusseau

* 1976. "Contraintes linguistiques et sociales dans la troncation du /l/ à Trois-Rivières." ''Cahiers de linguistique'' 6.13-22. Montréal: Presses de l'Université du Québe

* 1981. "Bom Sadek i bez li: la particule i en français." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 1.177-9

* 1982. "L'agglutination nominale en français colonial." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 2:2.185-20

* 1983, "Les réactions en chaîne en morphologie diachronique." ''Actes du 10e Colloque de la Société internationale de linguistique fonctionnelle, Université Laval, 9-11 mai." Québec: Presses de l'université Laval, pp. 285-29

* 1983. "Le créole, c'est du français, coudon." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 3:2.187-20

* 1987. "Relexification phylogénétique et structure de C" en créole haïtien et en fon." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 6:2.127-3

* 1987. "Interprétation diachronique de la morphologie verbale du créole réunionnais." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 6:2.137-5

* 1990. "Morphologie et syntaxe des syntagmes �when créole haïtien et en fon." ''Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists : Berlin/GDR, August 10-August 15, 1987''. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, vol. 1, pp. 644-64

* 1994. "Relexification et créologenèse." ''Actes du Congrès international des linguistes'' 15:4.335-38. Québec: Presses de l'Université Lava

* 1994. "Le créole haïtien, langue kwa relexifiée: vérification d'une hypothèse 'P&P' ou élaboration d'astuces computationnelles?" ''Créolistique et grammaire générative'', edited by Louis-Jean Calvet, 115-39. Paris: Sorbonne, Laboratoire de sociolinguistique (Plurilinguismes 8

* 1995. "Grammaire comparée des variétés coloniales du français populaire de Paris du 17e siècle et origines du français québécois." "Le français des Amériques", edited by Robert Fournier & Henri Wittmann, 281-334. Trois-Rivières: Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivière

* 1995. "La structure de base de la syntaxe narrative dans les contes et légendes du créole haïtien." ''Poétiques et imaginaires: francopolyphonie littéraire des Amériques'', edited by Pierre Laurette & Hans-George Ruprecht, 207-18. Paris: L'Harmatta

* 1996. "La forme phonologique comparée du parler magoua de la région de Trois-Rivières." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 13.225-4

*1996. "L'Ouest français dans le français des Amériques: le jeu des isoglosses morphologiques et la genèse du dialecte acadien." ''L'Ouest français et la francophonie nord-américaine: actes du Colloque international de la francophonie tenu à Angers du 26 au 29 mai 1994'', edited by Georges Cesbron, 127-36. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Anger

* 1996. "Contraintes sur la relexification: les limites imposées dans un cadre théorique minimaliste." ''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 13.245-8

*1998. "Le français de Paris dans le français des Amériques." Proceedings of the International Congress of Linguists 16.0416 (Paris, 20-25 juillet 1997). Oxford: Pergamo

*1998. "Les créolismes syntaxiques du français magoua parlé aux Trois-Rivières." ''Français d'Amérique: variation, créolisation, normalisation'' (Actes du colloque, Université d'Avignon, 8-11 oct.), edited by Patrice Brasseur, 229-48. Avignon: Université d'Avignon, Centre d'études canadienne

* 1999. "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." The Creolist Archives Papers On-line, Stockholms Universite

* 1999. "Non-existential analogues of the verb to be in West African Languages, in Haitian Creole and in Magoua French." Paper, 9th International Conference on Creoles Studie

*2001. "Lexical diffusion and the glottogenetics of creole French." CreoList debate, parts I-VI, appendixes 1-9. The Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University & Wayne State University. (https://web.archive.org/web/20140511211442/http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/creolist.html

External links

Site honoring Henri Wittmann
: with an extensive bibliography and free access to some of his most important writings.
Archives Henri Wittmann
: selected writings.
Entry in Linguistlist
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wittmann, Henri 1937 births Living people French emigrants to Quebec Francophone Quebec people University of Paris alumni Linguists from Canada Writers from Quebec