W. HIRTLE, Language in the Mind. An Introduction to Guillaume's Theory.

Walter HIRTLE, Language in the Mind. An Introduction to Guillaume's Theory, Montréal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 288 p.
ISBN 0773532633


RÉSUMÉ

The work of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960) has had an important influence on French linguistics. But his theory of psychomechanics, which views language as systematic and semiotic, is not well known in the English-speaking world. Language in the Mind is the first detailed study of Guillaumian linguistics in English.

Guillaume sees the word as the link between language as potential and as actual discourse. Meaning is both the representation of the speaker's momentary experience and the determining factor in the the word's use in discourse. Walter Hirtle illustrates Guillaume's general principles with examples drawn from contemporary English grammar and uses comparisons with other approaches, especially cognitive linguistics, to situate Guillaume's distinctive view of language as essentially a mental phenomenon.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Preface ix
1 Introduction 3
2 Language and the Ability to Speak 18
3 Words, Words, Words 30
4 Meaning: Representing Experience 51
5 A System for Representing 66
6 The Method of Analysis in Psychosystematics 85
7 The Substantive: A System of Subsystems 106
8 The Substantive and the System of the Parts of Speech 120
9 Some and Any 140
10 The System of the Verb 155
11 Auxiliaries: How Do They Help? 174
12 The Proof of the Pudding 189
13 The Noun Phrase 201
14 Concord, Discord, and the Incidence of Verb to Subject 213
15 Thought and Language 225
16 Conclusion 237
Glossary 243


BIOGRAPHIE

Hirtle is the former director of the Fonds Gustave Guillaume, an archive of 60,000 manuscript pages of the theorist's work, which is housed at Laval University, the principal centre for the study of psychomechanics.