André MARTINET was born on 12 April 1908 in St.-Albans-des-Villards, in the province of Savoy, France. His early childhood was spent in the villages where his parents were schoolteachers.
As a result, together with his sister, he lived in linguistic situations whose bilingualism (patois and French) he later became aware of and which developed in him a precocious interest in problems of language. When he was 11 years old, he and his family moved to Paris.
Having obtained ‘agrégation in English’ in 1930 at the age of 22, he immediately widened his horizon first to Germanic languages and then to general linguistics. As early as 1932, noticing that there was a parallel between his own linguistic conceptions and those of the Prague School whose manifesto had been presented by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson and Karcevsky at the International Congress of Linguists held in the Hague in 1928, Martinet established epistolary contacts with Trubetzkoy and published in 1936 ‘Neutralisation et archiphonème’ in Vol. 6 of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague (TCLP VI).
During the same period, because of his frequent stays in Denmark, Martinet established friendly relations with the Danish linguists Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Uldall and participated to a certain extent in the elaboration of glossematics which saw the light of day in 1943 with the publication of Omkring sprogtheoriens grundlaeggelse, which he made known outside Denmark through the substantial review of it he published in 1946 in Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris.
André Martinet obtained his doctorate for his two theses: the main thesis was ‘La gémination expressive en germanique’ and the subsidary thesis was ‘La phonologie du mot en danois’. He was then appointed in the autumn of 1937 as Professor and Director of Phonological Studies, a post which had just been created at École pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne.
Due to the outbreak of the Second World War, all contacts among linguists of different nationalities were interrupted. As a prisoner of war in Germany, Martinet took advantage of his incarceration to carry out a phonological investigation which later resulted in the publication of La prononciation du français contemporain (1945).
The armistice saw the Prague School virtually dissolved: Trubetzkoy had died in 1938, Jakobson was in New York, and establishing relations with those linguists who remained in Czechoslovakia was difficult.
In 1946, Martinet accepted an invitation to direct researches of the International Auxiliary Language Association in New York where he was to settle. He met Jakobson again and the two of them battled against American linguists’ isolationism in order to acquaint them with European linguistics.
Contacts were easily established with Sapir’s disciples, viz. Morris Swadesh, Harry Hoijer, Mary Haas; then later on with Kenneth Pike, but not so easily with Bloomfield. In collaboration with Swadesh, then Joseph Greenberg, Uriel Weinreich and finally Louis Heller, Martinet directed the journal Word from 1947 to 1964-65. Martinet maintained, not without difficulty, the policy that Word should publish articles in French as well English, an unprecedented policy at the time in American linguistics.
Appointed in 1947 as Head of the Department of Linguistics at Columbia University, Martinet taught not only synchronic linguistics but also comparative linguistics of Indo-European languages and diachronic linguistics, and this afforded him the opportunity to elaborate and develop the theory concerning economy and dynamic linguistics which he presented in Économie des changements phonétiques, published in Bern in 1955. It is to be noted that, if Martinet insisted on the need to clearly distinguish between the ‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’ points of view, he did not confuse these two terms with the terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’. As far as he was concerned, he never envisaged linguistic matters other than in their dynamism.
Martinet’s presentation of Sausssure in his seminars prompted Wade Baskin to translate Cours de linguistique générale. Martinet encouraged Baskin in his undertaking and established contact with his Geneva colleagues, the contact which enabled Baskin to complete his undertaking.
Francis Whitfield who, in order to better understand glossemantic thinking, had started translating (Hjelmslev’s) Omkring sprogtheoriens grundlaeggelse into English, consulted Martinet on several occasions during the course of 1951-52. Martinet urged Whitfield to get in touch with Hjelmslev and convinced Hjelmslev during his short stay in New York in the spring of 1952 of the usefulness of the translation. Whitfield’s translation was published under the title of Prolegomena to a Theory of Language.
At the same time, at Hjelmslev’s request, Martinet submitted a French translation (by whom?) to a decisive critique which was a basis for the first edition of Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage.
On the other hand, the researches on language universals which were beginning to see the light of day about that time provoked Martinet’s reservations which were reinforced when language universals became a fashion. Martinet himself retained as universals only those features which he incorporated into his definition of a language.
Once it has been established what a language is, linguistics will very precisely aim to look for what features in a given language characterize it and differentiate it from other languages. Divergences between Martinet’s viewpoints and those of Jakobson were clearly highlighted. Jakobson’s apriorism was opposed to Martinet’s realism. Martinet could not go on publicly showing himself in agreement with points of view which he fought against in private during their face-to-face meetings and long telephone conversations. Any conciliation turned out to be impossible concerning binarism.
When Martinet returned to France in 1955, he obtained the chair of general linguistics at the Sorbonne. There was no longer a chair of phonology at École pratique des Hautes Études, but in 1957 the post of the Director of structural linguistics was created for him there.
From then on, besides his teaching of linguistics to undergraduates at the Sorbonne, which resulted in 1960 in the publication of Éléments de linguistique générale, the work which has been translated into twenty or so languages to this day, Martinet trained large numbers of researchers in his seminars at École pratique des Hautes Études and supervised doctoral theses on many varied languages. The ever-increasing administrative tasks hardly slowed down his scientific output. In 1965, Martinet founded the journal La Linguistique which was essentially conceived as a tribune of linguistic functionalism.
Martinet’s scientific activities appeared to be closely linked to the development of contemporary linguistics. His linguistic vision which is condensed in his definition of a language corresponds to a positive elaboration which is constantly made through contact with others’ thinking, but rarely under their direct pressure.
Gaston Bachelard wrote: ‘In meditating philosophically on each notion, one would also see more clearly the polemic character of the retained definition, all that this definition distinguishes, cuts out, refuses.’ A careful examination of the definition of a language as proposed by Martinet reveals that, notwithstanding the positive and non-polemic character of his definition, it is in fact oppositional and marks at every point its difference with regard to such or such a theory.
Martinet wrote: ‘A language is an instrument of communication whereby human experience is analyzed, differently in each community, into units, i.e. monemes, each endowed with a semantic content and a vocal expression. The vocal expression is in its turn articulated into phonemes, which are distinctive and successive units. The number of phonemes is determined in each language and their nature and mutual relationships differ from language to language’.
The elements of this definition of a language indubitably follow Saussurean thinking. This fact did not elude the attention of Tulio de Mauro who said that André Martinet was in fact the most saussurean among the linguists of his generation. One should notice, however, that the object of Martinet’s definition of a language is that of a language and not that of language.
This reminds one that Martinet rejected the ‘langue-parole’ dichotomy and was in fact critical of sausssurean ‘signs’, whatever their dimensions may be: the moneme, the syntagm, the phrase… to the basic distinctive unit, the phoneme.
Distributionalism adhered to by Bloomfield and his disciples categorically rejects meaning and therefore disregards the ‘signifié–signifiant’ distinction, and in fact reduces linguistic analysis to segmentation into ‘constituents’ which are linearly and hierarchically conceived, from distinctive features via morphemes upward to phrases, each constituent of a higher rank consisting of a certain number of constituents of the rank immediately below. In contrast to Bloomfieldian distributionalism, Martinet’s linguistic analysis is conducted through the theory of double articulation so that the first articulation results in monemes, each being two-sided, i.e. a semantic content and a vocal expression, and the second articulation analyzes the vocal expression into phonemes, each being single-sided.
The hierarchization implied by double articulation contrasts also with the parallel between the two hjelmslevian planes, just as Martinet’s insistence on vocal expression contrasts his formulation with Hjelmslev’s strictly relational non-substantial conception which characterized the earliest period of glossematics.
Lastly, Martinet’s insistence on the differences between communities of speakers and on the differences between languages manifests his refusal to operate with universals or with the apriori models, in opposition to Jakobson’s globalist views.
The emergence on the linguistic scene of transformational and generative grammars brought nothing that could modify Martinet’s positions.
The critiques levelled by Chomsky and his followers were to a narrow bloomfieldianism, which had previously been denounced by Martinet himself as early as 1940’s.
The majority of the contributions of Chomskyan inspiration reside in logical, semantic or psychological frameworks, which are extraneous to a stream of linguistics which concerns itself above all with the study of so-called ‘natural’ languages. To a functionalist, there is nothing to glean from the enormous Chomskyan output founded on presuppositions which are totally different from the functionalist’s.
Martinet never yielded to the fomalising pressure which ultimately leads to putting the study of language aside. At every stage of functionalist research, a new angle of vision is chosen that allows it to incorporate into linguistics proper all that others would like to create under such names as sociolinguistics, pragmatics or discourse.
Martinet made himself known first through his contribution to phonology which was condensed and illustrated in his work La description phonologique which appeared in 1956. However, his supervision during the course of 50’s and 60’s of a considerable number of theses on very varied languages, above all African languages, led him to elaborate a syntactic theory which found its application in his Grammaire fonctionnelle du français published in 1979 and its theoretical framework, six years later, in his Syntaxe générale.
For Martinet, research on synchrony opens the way for a dynamic conception of synchrony. This means that one no longer freezes forever language reality at a given moment, but one observes the development of every language in its perpetual changes, that is, the evolution of every language as it functions. A functional synchrony is therefore necessarily a dynamic synchrony, which is summarized in the formula: ‘Une langue change parce qu’elle fonctionne’.
Following the wishes of his Parisian audience, Martinet returned to comparative studies which had always fascinated him and which had represented a major part of his activities during his New York days. He devoted to them two yearly seminars at École pratique des Hautes Études.
These finally produced a panorama of the expansion in time and space of speakers of Indo-European languages, and also produced a dynamic outline of the structure of linguistic forms from what we can grasp through internal reconstruction up to the different forms which the languages assumed following the dissolution of the primitive unit. This can clearly be seen in Martinet’s book entitled Des steppes aux océans: l’Indo-Européen et les ‘Indo-Européens.
From a more general perspective, the fonctionalist theories inspired the creation of functional semiology whose main proponents are Luis Prieto, Georges Mounin and the author of these lines. During the same period, a real functionalist school was born around André Martinet.
At the initiative of certain of his students and disciples from New York and Paris, a first international colloquium of functional linguistics was organized in Groningen in 1974 where researchers met who shared the same viewpoints and wished to escape for a time from the aggressiveness of chomskyanism then triumphant. This first colloquium was followed by annual colloquia which have been held in different countries.
Though he retired in 1977, André Martinet, Emeritus Professor of Université René Decartes, did not put an end to his teaching, researching and publishing activities. He continued till 1995 his weekly lectures at École pratique des Hautes Études. For many years he continued to teach through lecture tours or holding seminars worldwide, from Mexico to Japan, from the southernmost University of Valdivia in Chile to the northernmost University of Oulu in Finland.
Despite health problems which prevented him from traveling from 1996 on, Martinet maintained his editorial duties for La Linguistique, held meetings at his home and still continued to publish a few articles. Two subjects in particular passionately interested him: the origin and history of the alphabet and writing systems in general; and language acquisition in children.
On the first subject, Martinet left a few pages of an uncompleted manuscript, a preliminary draft of a work whose scope he could fathom and which he did not envisage being able to complete.
On the second subject, he published in 1998 the article: ’L’écholalie’ in La Linguistique, a first sketch of what he would have wished to write.
