Guillaume’s Glottogenesis in the Frameworks of General, Indo-European and Romance Linguistics. Part 1

Abstract

In this article, the phenomenon of linguistic glottogenesis is studied, which in G. Guillaume’s psychosystematic theory is interpreted not as the oldest process of formation of a natural sound language, but as a linguistic change that took place at a short cut of the evolution “Latin – French”, and in the works of his followers is considered as a “phenomenon of the development of French analyticism”. The article analyzes three concepts of the word-sentence in modern linguistics (none of them coincide with the interpretation of this term in the works of G. Guillaume’s followers): 1) as an undifferentiated unit, that goes back to the “diffuse syntax”, which fits in with the ideas of syncretism of the “primitive” culture of A.N. Veselovsky; 2) as one-part (nominative and impersonal) sentences; 3) as situational statements that perform the function of remarks in dialogical communication. The syntactic studies of the 20 th – 21 st centuries have shown that the core of the Indo-European utterance is not the nominality defended by G. Guillaume and his followers, but verbal predicativity (argumentative-and-predicate structure). The research into the process of the Indo-European language type evolution elicits the “pre-inflectional” character of Indo-European languages at the “initial” stage of the development, contrary to Guillaume’s basic position. Empirical evidence suggests that, synthetism and analyticism, not being the main characteristics in typological classification, are shown to explicate its two types – inflectional and agglutinative. In the history of Indo-European languages, in addition to the shift from synthetic constructions to analytical ones, there was often a reverse process as well.

Keywords

• glottogenesis
• indo-european studies
• romanсe studies
• french
• western romance languages
• analyticism
• predicate-argumentative structure