On the Historical Source of Immediate-Constituent Analysis

The strict dichotomy between traditional grammar and ‘scientific’ linguistics posited in this article cannot be maintained. First, traditional grammar did not precede linguistics: the two coexisted, albeit uneasily, at least from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Moreover, we professional linguists are now aware, much more than we were thirty or forty years ago, that traditional grammar is not a monolithic entity. That having been said, I still maintain that some of the most cherished beliefs held by immediate-constituent theorists of the 1950s were incompatible with fundamental tenets of syntactic analysis as it had been widely practised in the near and distant past. The crucial influence of Wundt on Bloomfield, moreover, seems reasonably clear, although much in Wundt’s scholarly ideology is far from clear, and Bloomfield’s theoretical outlook undoubtedly changed when he repudiated Wundtian psychology and embraced the theories of A. P. Weiss (1879-1931), who like Wundt was both a psychologist and a philosopher of science. As I pointed out in the 1976 version of this article, Wundt’s criticism of his linguistic colleagues was aimed at what he called the definitions of traditional grammar.

To understand this we must remember that a fundamental characteristic of the Western grammatical tradition was that it was built on definitions of key terms. Grammatical textbooks were full of definitions. This was partly because grammar was taught to youngsters, who need to be given thumbnail definitions. From antiquity right up to the mid-twentieth century, moreover, grammarians and linguists concentrated much of their fire on their opponents’ definitions and terminology or on definitions and terminology that they categorized as traditional. As an eminent twentieth-century linguist once expressed it: “We are a pugnacious profession”! The so-called structuralists of the first half of the twentieth century were, if anything, even more obsessed with rigorous definitions than their predecessors had been. What was peculiar in the American structuralist toolkit, however, was the notion of operational definitions. With the vogue for so-called distributional procedures came a requirement that for a new term to be scientifically valid it had to support an infallible discovery procedure. This fact helps to explain much that might otherwise seem bizarre in the procedures of the immediate-constituent analysts of the 1940s and 1950s.

Another peculiarity of immediate-constituent analysis and of much linguistic theorizing of the 1940s and 1950s was the preference for binary analyses. (As we shall see in a moment, this idea goes a long way back, but linguists did not know this at the time.) Breaking down sentences into two and only two immediate constituents was one example of this obsession at work. Obviously, in morphological analysis, many words can also be divided in two. Thus, English unfriendliness consists of the suffix -ness and unfriendly, which in turn consists of the prefix un- and friendly, which breaks down into friend and the suffix -ly. It is interesting to note that Bloomfield most often applied the notion of immediate constituent in morphological analysis (see Language, pp. 209ff., p. 221f.). In that area, we should recall, binary analysis had been extensively practised by the traditional grammarians of Sanskrit in India, with whose work Bloomfield was well acquainted. (Hence, we have yet another source for his binary procedure.) Later theorists in the U.S. also continued to apply immediate-constituent analysis below the word level. For reasons that are unclear to me, this fact tends to be forgotten nowadays.

Strictly speaking, however, by the time he wrote his monograph Language Bloomfield did not divide sentences into “subjects” and “predicates,” because by then he disapproved of those two quintessentially traditional terms, replacing them with his own terms “actor” and “action.” Rulon Wells did not use those two traditional terms either, but perhaps for a different reason. He may have been loath to create terminology to refer to phrasal categories. If he divided an English sentence such as Poor John ran away into two halves, he was reluctant to label the resulting pieces. The aim was to discover each layer of immediate constituents inductively by means of scientific, i.e., reproducible, procedures, and ideally the analyst should eschew the traditional phrasal terminology in order to underline his emancipation from the errors of the past. (See Wells’s own reference to the terms “subject” and “predicate” in his article “Immediate Constituents,” §14.)

Dividing sentences binarily into subjects and predicates was clearly not Wundt’s invention either, nor had it been a recent innovation. I was guilty of exaggeration when I suggested in endnote 5 of the 1976 article that the binary subject-predicate analysis of the sentence that I had seen in A New English Grammar by the English grammarian E. A. Sonnenschein (Oxford, 1916) “does not reach very far back.” In fact, this procedure was already common practice among grammarians in the nineteenth century and as far back as the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which point it had been introduced from the analysis of the proposition into subject and predicate by logicians. For the most part, however, grammarians did not subject entire sentences to analysis. Moreover, when they used the terms “subject” and “predicate” they tended to cite cases in which subjects or predicates were single words, like, for instance, English Smoke rises. This was to a large extent a distant legacy of traditional logic, which tended to deal with basic propositions consisting of just two categorematic terms, namely a one-word subject accompanied by a one-word predicate. I might cite a couple of typical examples of this practice from the Logica magna, a late medieval textbook of logic by Paul of Venice (died 1428): Socrates currit ‘Socrates runs’ and Plato est bonus ‘Plato is good.’ See Logica magna Pauli Veneti (Venice: Albertino Vercellese, 1499; HC *12505), f. 102ra.

If grammarians were aware of logic, logicians were necessarily also aware of grammar throughout this period. But the fact that close relations existed does not mean that grammarians and logicians analysed sentences and propositions in the same way. This was because their perspectives were different. Thus, a logician, well aware that for his colleague the grammarian a logical constant such as necessario ‘necessarily’ was simply an adverb, could submit to elaborate logical analysis a proposition containing it, such as anima Antichristi necessario erit ‘the soul of the Antichrist will necessarily exist.’

Originally, grammar and logic had been separate disciplines that were regarded in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the early modern period as part of the so-called ‘liberal arts’ (within the liberal arts, to be precise, they were components of the trivium). However, cross-fertilization between those two curricular traditions increased as time went on. The High Middle Ages, a period responsible for the explosive growth of university education, brought grammar and logic closer together. Close relations also existed in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, especially in southern Europe, between grammar and rhetoric, which was the third component of the trivium. Individual scholarly disciplines never live in a vacuum, however. In so many cases the same students would sit in grammar classes as sat in the classes that covered logic and/or rhetoric. Moreover, in many cases the same instructor taught one subject as taught the other. Then as now, teachers were forced to be jacks-of-all-trades.

At first, the advent of Renaissance humanism in early fifteenth-century Italy had the effect of severing the connections that had existed in the immediately preceding period between grammar and logic, but in the following century these connections were re-established. The earliest example of this rapprochement that I have seen so far is in the works of the Protestant humanist Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560). Like many educators, Melanchthon taught both grammar and logic. Indeed, he undertook to set up a special Protestant curriculum covering all the basic scholarly disciplines.

The fact that logic was an integral part of the curriculum in the sixteenth century meant that the analysis of propositions into subjects and predicates was familiar to students and could be appealed to on occasion in grammar classes. It is interesting to observe Melanchthon injecting elements of logical syntax into his grammatical textbook Syntaxis and defending this practice on pedagogical grounds. Specifically, he argues that unless students know how to divide a sentence into subject and predicate they cannot understand its structure, and he suggests that such an analysis is based on natural principles (on what he calls natura sermonis ‘the nature of speech’). Logicians are the people who point the way here, says Melanchthon. It is useful for youngsters beginning the study of Latin to be taught the terms subject and predicate so that they can understand how sentences are put together.¹This is the gist of a passage from Syntaxis olim a Philippo Melanthone collecta, nunc locupletata, ut sit ad usum scholarum accommodatior (Leipzig: Iacobus Berwaldus, 1547). For a somewhat fuller discussion, see my article “Remarks on Sentential Analysis in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Flores Grammaticae: Essays in Memory of Vivien Law, edited by Nicola McLelland & Andrew Linn (Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2005), pp. 67-79, at p. 76.

A century later, we witness a similar kind of importation of logical syntax into grammar on the part of the Port-Royal gentlemen in France: as is well known, they wrote both a treatise on logic and a number of grammatical textbooks, the most famous of which is the Grammaire générale et raisonnée which first appeared in Paris in 1660.²There is an extensive secondary literature on the Port-Royal Grammar. A major contribution that revived interest in that work which had previously been disparaged by professional linguists was Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); see especially pp. 31-51. On the analysis of the proposition in the Port-Royal Grammar, see Roland Donzé, La Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal: Contribution à l’histoire des idées grammaticales en France (Berne: Éditions Francke, 1967), pp. 129-136. It is interesting to note that in their Logique of 1662 (at the beginning of Part II), the Gentlemen of Port-Royal explicitly equate the French word attribut with the traditional Latin term praedicatum. Compare here Chomsky’s remarks, Cartesian Linguistics, p. 33. In this regard, Donzé displays parallel passages in the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic. Hence, the origin in logic of the syntactic notions of the authors is clear. A still valuable earlier study in this area is Gunvor Sahlin, César Chesneau du Marsais et son rôle dans l’évolution de la grammaire générale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1928), see particularly pp. 97, 101-104. As Sahlin puts it, “[L]a notion de la proposition et de ses éléments s’est introduite tardivement dans la grammaire” (p. 97). The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a number of rational grammars that further developed this kind of mixed logico-grammatical analysis. A good example is the Grammaire générale, ou exposition raisonnée des éléments nécessaires du langage by Nicolas Beauzée (Paris, 1767).

“For, although thought is indivisible,” says Beauzée in that book, “logic succeeds in breaking it down after a fashion by focusing separately on the various ideas that make up its content, so to speak, and on the relations (French relations) that unite them in thought (dans l’esprit). Any relation (relation) presupposes a first term and then a second term. Moreover, any idea that is the second term of a relation (rapport) is at the same time the first term of another relation (rapport)” (Beauzée, Grammaire générale, v. 2, pp. 1-2).³The original reads: “Car, quoique la pensée soit indivisible; la Logique vient à bout de l’analyser en quelque sorte, en considérant séparément les idées différentes qui en sont comme la matière, & les relations qui les unissent dans l’esprit. Toute relation suppose un premier terme, puis un second; & telle idée qui est le second terme d’un rapport, est en même temps le premier terme d’un autre rapport (vol. 2, pp. 1-2). On Beauzée’s relevance to the history of syntactic analysis, see Pierre Swiggers, “La Grammaire à l’âge classique et les sources de l’analyse en constituants immédiats,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique, Université Catholique de Louvain, 11.1-2 (1985), pp. 287-300.

Regardless of Beauzée’s priority in this development, about which I make no claim here, the fact remains that he expressed the basic concept of a hierarchical chain of relations uniting the constituents of a sentence. Syntax, therefore, could be reduced to a chain of relations. Almost two centuries later this kind of hierarchy was to underlie immediate-constituent analysis as formulated by Rulon Wells in his seminal 1947 article. The many intermediate steps are still not entirely clear. As is well known, Leonard Bloomfield set the ball rolling in American linguistics in his monograph Language of 1933, but as I showed in my 1976 article Bloomfield was in part building on ideas that he had personally inherited from Wundt. What complicates the picture, however, is that by trade Wundt was a psychologist, i.e. neither a linguist nor a grammarian. He could not reconcile his view of sentence structure with what he claimed were the definitions of traditional grammar. That he would make such a blanket assertion is undeniably puzzling because we know now that in the mid-nineteenth century some pedagogical grammars of German, notably the Ausführliche deutsche Grammatik by Karl Ferdinand Becker (two editions dating from 1836-1843), had already made the transition from a synthetic to an analytical approach to the sentence on roughly the same logical lines that we see indicated in Beauzée’s grammar.⁴Regarding the history of syntax in German-speaking countries, see Hans Glinz, Geschichte und Kritik der Lehre von den Satzgliedern in der deutschen Grammatik (Bern: Francke, 1947). See also Jan Noordegraaf’s valuable study “Constituentenanalyse: het spoor terug,” in his Van Hemsterhuis tot Stutterheim: Over wetenschapsgeschiedenis (Münster: Nodus, 2000), pp. 112-125. Note that Noordegraaf’s paper was part of a longer article that originally appeared in 1982.

What further complicates the picture is that Wundt himself was a philosopher with wide interests in many branches of that field, including logic: after all, he wrote a major monograph entitled Logik (Stuttgart, 1880). Logicians, of course, with their sophisticated predicate calculus, had been breaking down propositions into subjects and predicates since classical antiquity. As we have seen, Wundt saw an antithesis between his own way of analysing sentences and one characteristic of what he conceived of as traditional grammar. I suggest that this theoretical move on his part may still reflect the old disciplinary split between logic and grammar, at least in part.⁵Noordegraaf focuses on the historical importance of the grammatical writings of Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775-1849), which first came out between the 1820s and the 1840s. As Noordegraaf correctly points out (“Constituentenanalyse: het spoor terug,” p. 120), there is a demonstrable link between Becker and Wundt. In particular, Wundt was familiar with Becker’s Ausführliche deutsche Grammatik als Kommentar der Schulgrammatik (Frankfurt a. M.: G. F. Kettembeil, 1836-1839), for which see Wundt, Die Sprache, 2nd part, p. 320fn. There has been much valuable discussion of Becker’s ideas, see Hans Glinz, Geschichte und Kritik der Lehre von den Satzgliedern in der deutschen Grammatik (Bern: Francke, 1947), pp. 42-53; Gerhard Haselbach, Grammatik und Sprachstruktur: Karl Ferdinand Beckers Beitrag zur allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft in historischer und systematischer Sicht (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966); Kjell-Åke Forsgren, Die deutsche Satzgliedlehre 1780-1830: Zur Entwicklung der traditionellen Syntax im Spiegel einiger allgemeiner und deutscher Grammatiken, Göteborger germanistische Forschungen, 29 (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1985), pp. 62-68; Giorgio Graffi, 200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey, esp. pp. 136-139 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001), Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series III: Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 98. I know of no specific documentary evidence linking Becker with Beauzée. At the same time, his analysis of the sentence was firmly anchored in his own psychological theory of “apperception.” He was not merely a grammatical theorist.

In the meantime, however, the old non-logical approach to sentence structure, which also goes back to antiquity (take Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae as the prime example), had survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the non-logical approach I am referring to the view that the sentence is not a basic grammatical unit, but merely results from combinations of words, and therefore that the only truly basic grammatical unit is the word. A language, viewed from this perspective, is a collection of words and ways of using them in word-groups, i.e., expressions of varying length.

I might suggest in passing that this non-modern perspective may in part have been what led Ferdinand de Saussure to relegate much of sentence formation to parole ‘speech,’ not to langue ‘language,’ a decision that shocked some linguists who followed in his wake in the twentieth century. It is interesting to note that in the posthumous Cours de linguistique générale nothing is said about the sentence as a syntactic unit and in general attention is focused away from syntax to what the author termed the “syntagmatic” and “associative” relations among words and affixes. It is as if Saussure regarded the sentence as merely one of several types of word-groupings. In this connection, it is a curious, almost ironic, fact that Rulon Wells, the prime initiator of post-Bloomfieldian immediate-constituent analysis, was a major interpreter of Saussure’s theoretical system. The widespread focus on the sentence as a syntactic unit by many schools of twentieth-century linguistics may reflect the continuing influence of the logical tradition. Wells himself was philosophically trained.⁶The issue of Saussure’s approach to syntax is too complex for brief comment here. See his posthumous Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger (Lausanne & Paris: Payot, 1916, and later editions and translations into many languages), part 2, chapters 2 and 5. To get a sense of the secondary literature, see Tullio de Mauro’s critical edition of the Cours: Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique par Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1984), pp. 458-459, 468. For glimpses of what Saussure said orally to his students in 1911 about the position of syntax in his theoretical system, see Rudolf Engler, Lexique de la terminologie saussurienne (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1968), p. 50; and F. de Saussure, Troisième Cours de linguistique générale (1910-1911) d’après les cahiers d’Émile Constantin, edited by Eisuke Komatsu and Roy Harris (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), p. 73. For an interesting discussion, see W. E. Collinson, “Some Recent Developments of Syntactical Theory: A Critical Survey,” Transactions of the Philological Society, 1941, pp. 43-133, esp. p. 46. Rulon Wells’s thorough study of Saussure’s ideas is entitled “De Saussure’s System of Linguistics,” see Word 3 (1947), 1-31; reprinted in Martin Joos, ed. Readings in Linguistics: The Development of Descriptive Linguistics in America since 1925 (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1957), pp. 1-18. It is historically relevant to note the fact that Wells’s immediate-constituent project and his work on Saussure were being carried on at the same time and that they were both financially supported by the American Council of Learned Societies. Much soul-searching on the topic of general syntactic theory was caused by the book Was ist Syntax? Ein kritischer Versuch by John Ries (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1894). (A second expanded edition came out in Prague in 1927, and a facsimile edition thereof in Darmstadt in 1967 [Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft]). See also Ries’s later book Was ist ein Satz? (Prague: Taussig & Taussig, 1931). Collinson had much to say about Ries’s provocative ideas, as also did, at about the same time (1944), the Romanian linguist Nicolae Draganu in his Storia della sintassi generale: Opera postuma, Italian translation by Carlo Tagliavini (Bologna: Riccardo Pàtron, 1970).

This all illustrates the fact that types of syntactic analysis inculcated in schools in recent times have varied greatly, and different systems have even competed with each other within the same country and more or less at the same time. When I myself studied English grammar in England in the early 1940s, I was not introduced to the type of subject-predicate analysis that had been promoted by Sonnenschein and the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology half a century earlier. In the United States, on the other hand, a sophisticated system of sentence-diagraming, still popular in the mid-twentieth century, was propounded in textbooks written in the 1870s by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, two English teachers at the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute in New York. (At this time, Reed was described as an “instructor” in English Grammar, while Kellogg was a “professor of the English Language and Literature.”) The Reed & Kellogg diagrams were similar to Wundt’s tree diagrams (although the two systems are not known to be directly connected historically). It is interesting to note that Reed & Kellogg’s approach to grammar rested on the traditional subject-predicate analysis of the sentence with a heavy reliance on the notion of dependency, which also had deep roots in the grammatical tradition. As far as I am aware, the vogue of the Reed & Kellogg system did not spread beyond the United States.

The fact that such analytical systems as the one developed by Reed and Kellogg in the nineteenth century were still popular in the United States in the twentieth century may partly explain the statement made by Zellig Harris that I cited at the beginning of the 1976 version of this paper. Much more relevant here, however, is the curious fact that in the course of the nineteenth century the term parse changed its meaning from describing individual words in terms of their respective parts of speech to analysing entire sentences in terms of their various sub-parts and specifying their syntactic interrelations. (See the two definitions of the term parse in recent electronic editions of The Oxford English Dictionary.) Most probably, John Lyons had this more recent meaning of parse in mind when he made the statement that I referred to at the beginning of my 1976 article. It is much less likely that his statement was an allusion to the British school tradition inaugurated by the English grammarian E. A. Sonnenschein, as I imagined earlier.⁷An example of this influence is J. C. Nesfield’s successful grammar, English Grammar Past and Present in Three Parts (London & New York: Macmillan, 1898), which came out later in a revised edition entitled English Grammar Past and Present in Three Parts: Revised (1924) in Accordance with the Views of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology (London: Macmillan, 1924 and later editions). However, his professed adherence in the later edition to the views of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology does not seem to have led him to modify his ideas about sentence analysis to any significant extent, at least in this book. Thus, in the chapter headed “Analysis of Sentences” he states in both editions: “There are four distinct parts or elements of which a Simple sentence can be composed; and the analysis of a sentence consists in decomposing it (that is, in analysing or breaking it up) into these several parts:(1) The Subject, (2) Adjuncts to the Subject, if any, (3) The Predicate, and (4) Adjuncts to the Predicate-verb if any.” (This passage may be found on p. 103 in both editions.) What we have here is a quaternary, not a binary, analysis of the nuclear clause. Note, however, that in both editions Nesfield uses the terms “subject” and “predicate.” In general, therefore, the use of the two familiar traditional terms does not entail an analysis of the sentence into two halves. Conversely, as we have seen above, a binary analysis of the sentence does not force analysts to use the terms “subject” and “predicate” either. On Sonnenschein and the specific recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology, see John Walmsley, “E.A. Sonnenschein and Grammatical Terminology,” in English Traditional Grammars: An International Perspective, edited by Gerhard Leitner (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991), pp. 57-80.

Provisional Conclusions

As I see it now, the creation of a terminology to refer to sentence parts and word-groupings of various kinds has had a long and complicated history. In traditional grammar, as we see it at the end of the classical period in the Institutiones grammaticae of Priscian (ca. 500 A.D.), sentence parts and word-groups were virtually ignored. This attitude, which seems peculiar to us nowadays, first began to change towards the end of the first millennium. What caused this development, we think, was the need that many teachers felt to convey basic grammatical notions to students whose native language was no longer Latin or any variety thereof. Vivien Law wrote insightfully on this development. See her Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (London: Longman, 1997). The valuable work of Roger Wright, Bengt Löfstedt and others may also be consulted in this context.⁸See Vivien Law, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (London & New York, 1997). On syntax, see pp. 266-267. She also makes some incisive comments about Priscian’s approach to word and sentence in her Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19-20.

Naturally, various systems of syntactic terminology arose during the many centuries that we perversely lump together under the rubric of the Middle Ages. One discovery that grammarians made quite early was that much of sentence structure can be illuminated once the main verb in a nuclear clause has been identified. This insight is reflected in rules compiled by grammarians of that period which called for the verb to be regarded as “governing” the case of all the major nominal elements in a simple sentence (not just the constituent that we nowadays call the object or complement).⁹For a careful analysis of the modern grammatical literature dealing with “object” and “complement,” see Jean-Claude Chevalier, Histoire de la syntaxe: Naissance de la notion de complément dans la grammaire française (1530-1750), Publications romanes et françaises, 100 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968). Note that despite the subtitle of his book Chevalier by no means neglects ancient and medieval developments. As regards medieval and early Renaissance syntax, see also Charles Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir à l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au Moyen Âge (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1869), pp. 212-391, and a collection of my own articles entitled Studies in Renaissance Grammar (Aldershot, England & Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004). The notion of government had not been completely absent in Priscian’s grammar, but it was not especially emphasized. Teachers of grammar in the Middle Ages grappled with the problem of formulating rules on how to analyse and construct sentences from the verb outwards, as it were.

Dividing the sentence into two principal constituents was a move that was made about 1300 in the treatises on the modes of meaning (de modis significandi), in what we nowadays call the “modistic” tradition, and these two sentence halves were called the suppositum and the appositum, corresponding to the logicians’ terms subiectum and praedicatum respectively. Since the modistic grammars have been extensively studied by scholars in recent decades, I shall not say anything about them at this point. One additional comment suggests itself, however. In roughly contemporary southern Europe (ca. 1200-1400), as I have pointed out above, an analysis of the sentence into three parts was prevalent. These three parts were the two I have just mentioned, plus the verb, so that for grammarians in this tradition their term appositum referred to the predicate minus the verb. This tripartite division meant that verbs could be classified in terms of the nominal elements they “governed” on both sides, to the left and as well as the right. (The terms left and right were used in relation to the verb, which was pictured as occurring between them in the natural order Subject-Verb-Predicate.) Oversimplifying, one might say that transitive verbs governed a noun in the nominative case to the left of the verb, and a noun in the accusative case to the right of the verb, while intransitive verbs governed a nominative on the left and no accusative on the right. Although the resulting elaborate classification of verbs must have been an extremely practical tool for students composing in Latin, it cannot be said to have yielded a general theory of sentence structure, which is perhaps unfortunate. Beyond the nuclear clause this system handled subordinate clauses with difficulty, if at all.

One might have expected this system to be discarded as soon as Renaissance humanism arrived, but this was not the case. In that regard, the fifteenth-century Italian humanists were still more or less completely medieval, and that is even true of an outstanding figure such as Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), whose influential Elegantiae linguae Latinae circulated widely from the mid-1440s on. Its vogue soon spread to northern Europe, mediated by such eminent scholars as Erasmus of Rotterdam.

As I have pointed out above, the logical analysis of nuclear clauses into subjects and predicates is certainly present in a treatise on syntax written by Philipp Melanchthon in the mid-sixteenth century. Future research will doubtless fill out this picture. It would be interesting to discover whether Melanchthon had any immediate precursors. Sufficee it to say that after the sixteenth century a blend of logical and grammatical analysis steadily gained popularity, as many scholars have shown. The landmarks are the famous Grammaire générale et raisonnée of 1660 and a series of “general” grammars that appeared in France during the period of the Enlightenment. However, the traditional kind of grammatical analysis inherited from late antiquity, the kind that considered the word to be the basic grammatical unit, coexisted with that newer tradition and survived into the twentieth century in some quarters. Historically speaking, this vacillation in basic orientation may even be a distinctive feature of traditional grammatical theorizing of recent date.

We need to distinguish several theoretical issues here. First, there is the question of whether the sentence is regarded as more basic, more “real,” than the words composing it. In such a framework, sentences are broken down into words, and words only exist as components of sentences. Alternatively, words are given primary status, and then sentences are viewed as resulting when words have been correctly concatenated. (We must bear in mind at all times that neither sentence nor word are pre-theoretical givens.) Second, there is the issue of whether there are intermediate units between the sentence and the word. At what point, one may ask, does the phrase, in the English sense of that term, come into the picture? (It was certainly already being used in English grammars of the mid-nineteenth century.) Third, there is the vogue among grammarians of the logical terms subject and predicate. Fourth, there is the question of how many parts the sentence should be primarily analysed into, which is connected with but not the same as the procedure of analysing sentences into subjects and predicates.¹⁰Instructive in this connection is Leonard Bloomfield’s short article “Subject and Predicate,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 47 (1916), 13-22, reprinted in A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology, edited by Charles F. Hockett (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 70-77. Fifth, there is the issue of the sorts of relations assumed to hold between sentence parts. Finally, there is the use in the classroom of graphic devices to mirror the analysis of sentences into parts and sub-parts and all their interrelations.

As for the diagraming system that we see in the works of Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it was copyrighted in 1868 by Reed and O. H. Hall. The copyright date of Graded Lessons in English was 1876, and Higher Lessons in English in 1877. As regards the two authors, Reed died in 1899, according to the “Online Computer Library Catalogue.” I know nothing about Kellogg other than the fact that he was a full professor at the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute at the same time as Reed was an instructor at that institution. I know nothing about O. H. Hall either.

An interesting fact is that Reed and Kellogg had a worthy predecessor, namely Stephen W. Clark (1810-1901), who published a number of popular grammar textbooks, one of which is entitled The Science of the English Language: A Practical Grammar, in which Words, Phrases, and Sentences are Classified according to their Offices, and Their Various Relations to one another, Illustrated by a Complete System of Diagrams. The first edition (but can we be sure that it was the very first?) dates from 1847 (New York: A. S. Barnes & Cincinnati: Derby, Bradley & Co). I have access to an 1863 edition bearing the copyright date of 1855. It is conceivable, therefore, that Clark’s example stimulated Reed and Kellogg. Superficially, however, their respective diagraming systems look quite different. Clark drew balloons round all the words in a sentence, and then the relative position of the balloons mirrored the various grammatical relationships between the words. Reed and Kellogg, on the other hand, used what one might call a stick notation: the sentence was symbolized by a long horizontal line with a small vertical line separating the subject from the predicate. From the horizontal line other lines sloped off to the right to symbolize the various modifiers of the major constituents and modifiers of modifiers.¹¹For samples of S. W. Clark’s and Reed & Kellogg’s sentence diagrams, see Henry A. Gleason, Jr., Linguistics and English Grammar (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 73, 142-151. We still have much to learn about the use of sentence diagrams by grammarians and linguists. A problem is caused by the curious fact that branching diagrams isomorphic with the familiar ones used by Noam Chomsky in his Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957) appear in A Synopsis of English Syntax by Eugene A. Nida, edited by Benjamin Elson, Linguistic Series, 4 (Summer Institute of Linguistics: University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 1960), and later editions. In the preface to this 1960 edition, Nida tantalizingly refers to “the usual set of lines used to show relationships between immediate constituents” (p. ix, italics mine). That might seem to indicate that sentence diagrams were not unusual in 1943 when Nida submitted the thesis on which his book was later based. However, the preface in which this comment occurs was allegedly not part of the original thesis. Unfortunately, I have so far been unable to consult the original University of Michigan thesis. However, I have seen a re-issue of the thesis published in 1951 in South Pasadena, Calif. by the Afghan Institute of Technology. In that document no branching diagrams whatever are to be found. Hence, we have so far no documentary evidence that linguists in the United States were using such systems before the appearance of Syntactic Structures in 1957. It is not known exactly where Chomsky himself adopted the use of such tree diagrams from. I once put the question to him, but he did not answer. A genuine example of branching diagrams from the 1930s can be found in Aage Hansen, Sætningen og dens led in moderne dansk (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag/Arnold Busck, 1933); see pp. 90, 93, and 105. Another and more elaborate system of branching diagrams was developed (independently, it would seem) by Lucien Tesnière in the thirties and subsequently expounded in his influential Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1959, 2nd ed. 1966). Tesnière reports there that he first began experimenting with what he calls ‘stemmas’ in 1932 and that on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1936 he was agreeably surprised to find that sentence diagrams were already in vogue there; see Éléments de syntaxe structurale, 1959 ed., p. 15, fn. 1. It would be interesting to know more about the use of branching diagrams in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century. An interesting example that I have run into may be seen in Sergei Kartsevskii (Serge Karcevski), ‘O formal’no-grammaticheskom napravlenii,’ Russkaia Shkola zu Rubezhom , 12 (1925), 47-65; see p. 52 for an example of a branching diagram. For the later use of branching diagrams by generative grammarians, see Barbara H. Partee et al., Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 30 (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), pp. 437ff. Outside linguistics, diagrams of various kinds have been extensively used in logic and mathematics, not to speak of fields like chemistry and physics. In his Logic Machines and Diagrams (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), Martin Gardner describes many such devices, reaching all the way back to Raymond Lull’s renowned Ars magna in the thirteenth century. Sun-Joo Shin, in her monograph The Logical Status of Diagrams (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), attacks the prejudice that both logicians and mathematicians have traditionally shown against the use of diagrams in reasoning; see especially pp. 184-189 of her book. Mark Greaves broadens this attack in his thought-provoking The Philosophical Status of Diagrams, CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 116 (Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2002). For tree diagrams in computer science, see Michael Main, Data Structures & Other Objects Using Java (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pp. 415-479; Richard F. Gilberg & Behrouz A. Forouzan, Data Structures: A Pseudocode Approach with C++ (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 2001), pp. 305-333. I am grateful to my colleague Earl J. Schweppe at the University of Kansas for directing my attention to the crucial role that tree diagrams play in computer science. Most probably, therefore, linguists adopted tree diagrams from their colleagues in modern algebra and related disciplines. In this respect, the study of language has been a kind of hanger-on of logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. For some historical discussion of this link between linguistics and mathematics, see Marcus Tomalin, Linguistics and the Formal Sciences: The Origins of Generative Grammar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

An even more interesting question is whether S. W. Clark also had predecessors in this matter of diagraming. I do not know the answer to this question. The development of grammar writing in the United States is discussed by Charlotte Downey in her stimulating article “Trends that Shaped the Development of 19th Century American Grammar Writing,” in English Traditional Grammars: An International Perspective, edited by Gerhard Leitner (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991), pp. 27-38. Downey divides nineteenth-century English grammarians in the United States into two groups: traditionalists and innovators. One characteristic of the traditionalists was to conceive of the sentence as divided into three major parts: subject, predicate, and object. The innovators, on the other hand, divided the sentence binarily into subjects and predicates. She does not mention W. S. Clark, but I can report that he falls squarely into the traditional camp in that while he uses the terms “subject” and “predicate,” he divides the sentence into subject, predicate, and object. For instance, he makes the following statement: “The Object of a Sentence, being distinct from the Grammatical Predicate, is properly regarded as a distinct Element in the structure of such Sentences as contain Objects” (Practical Grammar, p. 27). He distinguishes between the logical and the grammatical predicate thus: “The Logical Predicate includes the Grammatical Predicate and its Object” (ibid.). Hence, among grammarians of English active in the United States the binary division of the sentence into a subject half and a predicate half was an innovation of the nineteenth century, but it was not shared by all grammarians. In England, on the other hand, J. C. Nesfield, author of English Grammar Past and Present (1898), was still a traditionalist in this respect, and Nesfield’s influence was still felt in England in the mid-twentieth century.

As regards the development of syntax in the United States in the nineteenth century, one grammarian of that period, namely William Swinton, makes the following revealing statement: “The introduction, some thirty years ago, of the method of Sentential ANALYSIS, devised by the German philologist Becker, and adapted to American school use in the meritorious works of Professor Greene and others, marks the only considerable innovation, in this country, on the Murray system” (William Swinton, A Progressive Grammar of the English Tongue [New York: Harper, 1878], pp. iii-iv). Swinton is referring here to the famous grammarian Lindley Murray, whose English Grammar was popular in the United States in the early part of the century. The Professor Greene whom Swinton mentions here, was Samuel S. Greene (1810-1883), who published a number of highly successful textbooks, one of which has the suggestive title A Treatise on the Structure of the English Language: or the Analysis and Classification of Sentences and their Component Parts (Philadephia: Cowperthwait, 1846).

A decade earlier, a successful textbook writer called Boswell C. Smith published a series of grammars dubbed Smith’s New Grammar. An edition to which I have access has the suggestive title English Grammar on the Productive System: A Method of Instruction Recently Adopted in Germany and Switzerland (Hartford: Spalding & Storrs, 1838; copyright filed at the District Court of Massachusetts, 1831). In the preface to that work (pp. 3-6), Boswell Smith explains at some length that his own system incorporates the best features of two different contemporary European educational systems, namely what he refers to as the “Philanthropist” School and the School of Jean Henri Pestalozzi. The significance of Pestalozzi in the history of education is well known, the Philanthropists less so. They were followers of Johann Bernhard Basedow (1723-1790), who preceded Pestalozzi by a generation. At this point, I should perhaps add an interesting fact not mentioned by Boswell Smith, namely that both these schools had also created new pedagogical methods for arithmetic that were specifically designed for teaching elementary school children. Grammar was another basic discipline like arithmetic that had to be covered in elementary schools in the New World.

In addition to the educational aspect, it seems that familiarity with the early nineteenth-century German grammarian Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775-1849) was crucial: Becker’s system was what caused English grammarians in the United States to abandon the traditional synthetic approach to sentence analysis and adopt a binary division of sentences into subjects and predicates. Note, moreover, that we encounter in this period the notion that grammar was the study of language in general and also the novel idea that it had already become a “science.” Accordingly, scientific-sounding terms like “analysis,” “synthesis,””element,” and “structure” enter the picture. At the same time, the focus on relations (rapports) that we have seen in Nicolas Beauzée was added to this intoxicating terminological mixture.

That Becker’s ideas were already well known among teachers of grammar in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century is proved by the appearance of an explicit attempt to apply them to English, namely in a book by Josiah W. Gibbs entitled Philological Studies with English Illustrations (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1857). In his preamble, Gibbs states that the principles advocated by him “have been derived for the most part from distinguished German philologians, particularly from the writings of Dr. Karl Ferdinand Becker, and are here illustrated from our own language.” Moreover, he also makes it clear there that in this regard he is not the first to advocate these ideas: “Although many of these principles are now current in our schools of learning, the writer hopes that the publication may not be amiss” (p. iii). Gibbs’s ideas are relevant to the history of IC analysis in that he insists on applying the principle of phrase structure to the analysis of sentences. To quote him verbatim: “According to the view of modern philologists, a sentence or proposition is made up immediately, not of words, but of syntactical groups or combinations of words” (p. 39).

Various mnemonic devices widely used by twentieth-century professional linguists in the course of their work on syntax, such as diagraming and arithmetical notation,¹²We still know very little about how grammarians have exploited various kinds of arithmetical notation in grammatical analysis. We first of all know little about the range and extent of this application, and we know even less about the historical development of such systems of notation. An example of this kind of application from the recent past of linguistics is the elaborate system created by Otto Jespersen in his Analytic Syntax (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1937, reprinted New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969). In chapter 28 of Analytic Syntax (p. 97 in the 1937 edition, p. 87 in the 1969 edition), Jespersen mentions one predecessor, namely Adolf Stöhr, who wrote a book with the suggestive title Algebra der Grammatik: Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie der Formenlehre und Syntax (Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1898). There are two interesting historical facts to note here. First, Jespersen himself had almost half a century earlier, namely in the late 1880s, evolved an arithmetical (“analphabetic”) system to symbolize the component articulatory features of which speech sounds are composed. This he later expounded in his widely-read introduction to phonetics, Lehrbuch der Phonetik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1904, 2nd ed., 1913). (It may be noted here in passing that Jespersen’s “analphabetic” system was incorporated lock, stock, and barrel by the editors of their edition of the Cours de linguistique générale in 1916; see Cours, Introduction, Appendix, chapter I, §2.) Second, at least by the mid-1930s, if not earlier, logicians had begun to experiment with arithmetical notation systems to symbolize semantic categories occurring as constituents of sentences in natural language, on which see Giorgio Graffi, 200 Years of Syntax, pp. 315-320. Needless to say, it is hard to conceive of modern symbolic logic without the extensive use of symbolic manipulation. likewise go back to the nineteenth century, at least in the United States. Whether they go back farther than that I do not know at this stage. As we have seen, sentence diagraming had already appeared in S. W. Clark’s grammar in the 1840s, and in its further development at the hands of Brainerd Kellogg and his colleague Alonzo Reed two decades later it enjoyed immense popularity in the United States.

Another graphic device which has an undeniably scientific cachet is the use of capital and small letters to represent syntactic categories and sub-categories (e.g., N standing for Noun, VP standing for Verb Phrase), etc. This useful procedure is already found in Samuel Greene’s An Analysis of the English Language (Philadelphia: Cowperthwait, 1874), pp. 23-24. Greene introduces the idea as follows (a short extract will suffice to give an idea of what he had in mind):

“The entire sentence and its several elements may be represented by a system of significant symbols.

“(a.) No system can be devised to represent all the subtle distinctions of thought, and consequently no attempt is made to meet every emergency. It is proposed to show in a condensed form, the general features of any sentence.

“1. With the exception of V, taking the initial letters of the elements, capitals for the principal elements and small letters for the subordinate, we have S for subject, P for predicate, a, o, v, respectively for the adjective, objective, and adverbial elements” (Samuel Greene, Analysis of the English Language, p. 23).

Accordingly, a simple sentence like “Ice melts” is represented in Samuel Greene’s system with the letters S P; and “Red squirrels eat nuts” becomes a S P o. For sentences containing more than one member of the same class one after the other, he resorts to coefficients. A sentence such as “Those large red cherries tempt us” is represented 3 a S P o, the 3 indicating that three elements of the adjective class occur before the subject. (These examples all appear on p. 23 of the 1874 edition.)

Greene also uses exponents, e.g., S¹ P² represents a sentence such as “Birds are bipeds,” which contains a subject of class 1 followed by a predicate of class 2. Here, 1 is the default value, so a sentence like “She walked a queen” is represented S P P, without exponents (Samuel Greene, Analysis of the English Language (1874), p. 24). There are a number of further notational refinements that I cannot go into here. Suffice it to say that Samuel Greene could handle complex sentences of some length and complexity, as for instance “Wit is a shining quality that everybody admires; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves” (see the same page).

Even the expression “immediate constituent” was used by one of these nineteenth-century grammarians. S. W. Clark, namely, distinguishes between what he calls the “proximate” and the “ultimate” analysis of a sentence: “[…] the Proximate Analysis of a Sentence consists in resolving it into its immediate Constituent Elements (S. W. Clark, A Practical Grammar, [New York: American Book Company, copyrighted 1875] p. 69). On the other hand, Clark explains, “the Ultimate Analysis of a Sentence consists in reducing its Proximate Elements to the WORDS which compose them.” Thus, words were regarded as the ultimate constituents of a sentence, not morphemes, since the notion of the morpheme and Baudouin de Courtenay’s technical term “morpheme” were unknown at this time. While Clark’s use of the expression immediate Constituent Elements does not appear to signal the conscious creation of “immediate constituent” as a technical term, the underlying notion of an analysis of the components of a sentence into their ultimate and immediate constituents is clearly expressed.

Let me now return to the two main topics of my original paper, namely (1) the historical source of the theory of immediate constituents, and (2) the role of the phrase in the historical development of grammatical analysis. As for the first question, we do not know and may never know what system of grammatical analysis Bloomfield was exposed to as a schoolboy, but it is clear that some of the basic conceptual and terminological ingredients of the system that he was to present in his 1914 and 1933 books were already in use in school grammars of English current in the United States in the nineteenth century. Above all, the notion of sentence “analysis,” whether diagramable or not, had been applied in those grammars. That Bloomfield was at first powerfully attracted to Wilhelm Wundt’s linguistic and grammatical theories must also be regarded as an important additional factor, for Wundt had endorsed a type of syntactic analysis that originated in early nineteenth-century German pedagogical grammars of the type found in the works of Karl Ferdinand Becker. Wundt even mentions Becker’s Ausführliche deutsche Grammatik more than once (see, for instance, Die Sprache, 2nd part, p. 223fn. and p. 320fn.). It is possible, therefore, that in Bloomfield’s theory we see a confluence of the German and the American types of syntactic analysis. Obviously, however, more research needs to be done in this area. Here, I have merely outlined some of the salient features of the development, as I see them at the present time.

As regards my second main topic, the role of the phrase in traditional grammar, the use of the term varied. As I have mentioned, the English term first came into use in the mid-nineteenth century, but some grammarians defined it narrowly, as did Allen and Greenough in their New Latin Grammar (first published in 1888). However, a fact that I failed to mention in my original article, because I was not aware of it, is that some nineteenth-century grammarians of English, such as Josiah W. Gibbs (1790-1861), were already operating in terms of word-groups. There is, for instance, a clear example of phrasal constituents in Reed and Kellogg’s Higher Lessons in English, in which the expression that old wooden house is analysed thus: ‘Here wooden modifies house , old modifies wooden house, and that modifies old wooden house ([New York: Clark & Maynard, 1877], p. 30, fn.). In other words, according to Reed and Kellogg, the phrase wooden house is modified by a single word old, and the single word that modifies the three-word phrase old wooden house. We must conclude therefore that not all so-called traditional grammarians failed to recognize sentence constituents consisting of more than one word. Not only did some pedagogical grammarians in the nineteenth century already divide the sentence into a subject half and a predicate half (regardless of the length of those two halves), but some of them even recognized grammatical relations within these two halves that obtain between single-word and multi-word constituents. In this way, the conceptual foundations of what was later to be called immediate-constituent analysis were laid in the nineteenth century.

In connection with phrasal terminology, it is interesting to contrast the situation in the non-English speaking world. In Saussure’s influential Cours de linguistique générale, we find the term syntagme, which Saussure defined as referring to a sequence of two or more consecutive signifiants ‘signifiers.’ Saussure’s examples include the words re-lire ‘re-read’ and contremaître ‘foreman,’ which both clearly consist of two signifiants. In the manuscript sources, this principle is clearly spelled out: “Cette notion de syntagme peut s’appliquer à des unités de n’importe quelle grandeur, de n’importe quelle espèce” (Rudolf Engler, Lexique de la terminologie sausurienne [Utrecht/Antwerp: Spectrum, 1968], p. 50). On the other hand, many of Saussure’s other examples of the syntagme were what we in English would call phrases (or even sentences), e.g. désireux and Que vous dit-il?. It is interesting to note, however, that after Saussure the meaning of the term seems to have been narrowed down to ‘word-group.’ Hence, re-lire and contremaître are now no longer syntagmes. It appears that the neologism syntagme now functions as a technical term performing pretty much the same function in French as the English word “phrase.” In 1967, the French dictionary Le Petit Robert defined the term as ‘a group of words forming a unit within a sentence.’ (Emphasis mine.)

The earliest sign that I have ever seen that grammarians were beginning to think in terms of phrasal constituents occurs in the Grammatica nova ‘New Grammar’ by Bernard Perger, which seems to have been in existence by 1479. The passage in question reads as follows: “Quoniam adiectivum et suum substantivum tamquam pro una dictione in oratione habentur, ideo inter se in genere, numero, et in casu convenire debent, ut doctus vir, honesta mulier, crudele animal.” Rough English translation: “Inasmuch as an adjective and its substantive are considered to stand, as it were, for a single word in a sentence, they must therefore agree with each other in gender, number, and case, e.g. ‘learned [masc.] man,’ ‘honest [fem.] woman,’ ‘cruel [neuter] animal.'” Needless to say, it is difficult to be sure what is behind this statement, but it seems likely that grammarians at that time thought of a sequence consisting of an adjective and a noun as some sort of a unit. Supposedly, that fact was sufficient to explain the grammatical rule requiring the grammatical agreement of an adjective with its noun.¹³I am familiar with a 1501 edition of Perger’s Grammatica nova, printed by Martin Flach, Junior in Strasburg. I have consulted a microfilm made from the copy of this work in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (shelf mark Inc.c.a.754). The passage quoted here occurs on f. D3v. Perger’s Grammatica nova was an adaptation for the German-speaking market of the commercially successful Rudimenta grammatices of the Italian humanist Niccolò Perotti (1st edition Rome: Conrad Sweynheym & Arnold Pannartz, 19 March 1473 [Ludwig Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum, No. 12643] and many subsequent editions in Italy and elsewhere). On this work, see my article “The Influence of Perotti’s Rudimenta in the Cinquecento,” Protrepticon: Studi di letteratura classica e umanistica in onore di Giovannangiola Secchi-Tarugi, ed. Sesto Prete (Milan: Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici ‘Francesco Petrarca,’ 1989), esp. pp. 94-95; reprinted in my Studies in Renaissance Grammar, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS774 (Aldershot, England & Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004) as chapter X.

A considerably older strand in the grammatical tradition was the notion of dependency, on which I commented in my article “Reflections on the History of Dependency Notions in Linguistics,” Historiographia Linguistica, 17 (1990), 29-47. It is interesting to note that in the twentieth century a dependency framework underlay the successful Éléments de syntaxe structurale by Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954), which was published posthumously in 1959, although the author mentions that he had already begun working on his system in 1932 (see fn. 26 in this document). Note also Tesnière’s earlier brief Esquisse d’une syntaxe structurale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1953). On Tesnière, see the article about him by Kjell-Åke Forsgren in the Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, edited by Keith Brown et al. (Amsterdam & London: Elsevier, 2006), vol. 12, pp. 593-594.