Albert Seshe

He lived almost all his life in Geneva , graduated from the University of Geneva . From 1893 to 1902, he studied at the University of Göttingen and defended in German a dissertation on the history of the French subjunctive imperfect (imparfait du subjonctif), one of the first studies of the grammeme in the system context. After defending his thesis, he taught at the University of Geneva. Since 1939, Professor of the Department of General and Indo-European Linguistics, replaced Charles Bally , who retired by age.

Although Albert Seshe was one of the most original linguistic theorists of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries , he entered the history of linguistics “in the shadow of” his great teacher, Saussure , whose foundational “ General Linguistics Course ” for structuralism, posthumously with Charles Bally in 1916 . Seshe (like Bally) did not listen to Saussure’s later lectures, which formed the basis of the Course (although his wife went to some classes), the publishers used students' notes. It is known that the main work on the preparation of the text lay precisely on Sesha (Bally's scientific interests were somewhat different). Many ideas presented in the “Course” are not in the abstracts of the lectures of Saussure and his drafts, while Sesha has already come to some ideas anticipating the main provisions of structuralism for a number of years, largely independently of Saussure, and has already published them. After the “Course” came out and his ideas acquired world fame under the name of Saussure (who was not going to publish anything of the kind), Shesh's own works were unfairly forgotten. There is also the paradoxical hypothesis of P. Wunderley about “Saussure as a disciple of Sesha”; undoubtedly, it is polemically exaggerated, the question of priority is rather complicated here (it is necessary to take into account the oral exchange of ideas between scientists), but the great independent significance of Sesha in the history of linguistics and the development of structuralism is undoubted.

The first book of Seshe (and in general the first publication, not counting the thesis) "Program and Methods of Theoretical Linguistics" ( fr. Program et méthodes de la linguistique théorique ) was published in 1908 , it is dedicated to Saussure. In the book, Shesh proposes a detailed, step by step, from phonetics to semantics (in Breal's understanding) a scheme for constructing a normal science of language - the “science of laws”, which generalizes and explains observable language phenomena; he criticized the comparative historical linguistics prevailing then in the understanding of the young gramographers for the purely positivist striving for the “science of facts” accumulating certain phenomena observed in the history of languages. The “science of laws” is extra-historical and generally significant, the “science of facts” is historical. He divides all levels of the science of language into "static" and "dynamic" (cf. synchrony and diachronic after Saussure; Saussure announced the corresponding ideas already after the publication of Seshe's book). According to Sesha, it is the “static” (primarily timeless, universal) facts that are primary, the dynamics have only a subordinate position (unlike Saussure, who considered these two components independent).

The Seshe book outlines original ideas about the universal typological causes of language changes, about the "pre-grammatical language" (including the psycholinguistics of children's speech), proposed an extensive concept of synchronous phonology , echoing the ideas of I. A. Baudouin and N. V. Krushevsky and anticipating many phonological ideas of the 20th century . These directions remained practically not developed by Saussure and other authors of the Geneva School.

An important feature of all stages of Shesh's activity (which distinguished him from other structuralists) is the attention to the psychological character of linguistic and speech units.

In the works of the 1920s-1940s, Seshe already takes into account the ideas of the “Course” Saussure, although in many respects he argues with him. In 1926 he published his second book, Essay on the logical structure of a sentence, devoted to syntax, where he considers the relationship between logical and syntactic structures (at that time many more identified). In his articles of the late period, he proposed the construction of “linguistics of organized speech”, emphasizing the insufficiency of the Sosyur dichotomy “ language and speech ”, tried to construct sociological definitions of phonemes and other language units.

• Seshe A. Program and Methods of Theoretical Linguistics. [Articles]. M .: URSS, 2003
• Seshe A. Essay on the logical structure of the sentence. [Articles]. M .: URSS, 2003