Émile Benveniste

Who was Émile Benveniste?

Émile Benveniste was a French structural linguist and semiotician.

He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his expansion of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure. Initially studying under Antoine Meillet, a former student of Saussure, at the Sorbonne, he began teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and was elected to the Collège de France a decade later in 1937 as professor of linguistics. By this time he had already begun his investigation into the status of names within the history of Indo-European linguistic forms. He held his seat at the Collège de France until 1969 when he retired due to deteriorating health. However, he served as the first President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies from 1969 to 1972.

Benveniste was born in Aleppo, Aleppo Vilayet, Ottoman Syria. At the start of his career, his highly specialised and technical work limited his influence to a small circle of scholars. The publication of his monumental text, Problèmes de linguistique générale or Problems in General Linguistics, would elevate his position to much wider recognition. The two volumes of this work appeared in 1966 and 1974 respectively. The book exhibits not only scientific rigour but also a lucid style accessible to the layman, consisting of various writings culled from a period of more than twenty-five years. In Chapter 5, Animal Communication and Human Language, Benveniste refutes behaviourist linguistic interpretations by demonstrating that human speech, unlike the so-called languages of bees and other animals, cannot be merely reduced to a stimulus-response system.