André Martinet

Martinet, André 

Born Apr. 12, 1908, in St.-Alban-desl’illards, department of Savoie. French linguist.

Martinet studied at the universities of Paris (the Sorbonne) and Berlin. He has been a professor at Columbia University (1947-55) and the Sorbonne (since 1955). He has been president of the International Auxiliary Language Association (1946-48) and of the Linguistic Society of Europe (since 1966). He was one of the founders of Word (1945), a journal of linguistics. Martinet formulated the basic tenets of functional phonology and introduced the principle of the study of entire systems in diachronic phonology; in particular, he described the mechanism of phonological chain reaction and a number of .other factors in phonetic change. He wrote works on Indo-European phonology and morphology and the Romance, Germanic, Celtic, and Basque languages.

WORKS

La Gémination consonantique d’origine expressive dans les langues germaniques. Copenhagen, 1937.
La Prononciation du francais contemporain. Paris, 1945.
Phonology as Functional Phonetics. London, 1949.
A Functional View of Language. Oxford, 1962.
In Russian translation:
Printsip ekonomii v foneticheskikh izmeneniiakh. Moscow, 1960.
“Osnovy obshchei lingvistiki.” In the collection Novoe v lingvistike, issue 3. Moscow, 1963.