Émile Benveniste
| Émile Benveniste | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 27, 1902 Aleppo, Ottoman Empire |
| Died | October 3, 1976 (aged 74) Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Linguist |
Émile Benveniste (French: [bɛnvənist]; 27 March 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French structural linguist and semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Benveniste was born in Aleppo, Aleppo Vilayet, Ottoman Syria to a Sephardi family. His father sent him to Marseilles to undertake rabbinical studies, but his exceptional abilities were noted by Sylvain Lévi who introduced him to Antoine Meillet.
Initially studying under 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, after he suffered a stroke that left him aphasic. However, he served as the first President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies from 1969 to 1972.
Benveniste died in Paris, aged 74.
At the start of his career, his highly specialised and technical work limited his influence to a small circle of scholars. In the late thirties, he aroused some controversy for challenging the influential Saussurian notion of the sign, that posited a binary distinction between the phonic shape of any given word (signifier) and the idea associated with it (signified). Saussure argued that the relationship between the two was psychological, and purely arbitrary. Benveniste challenged this model in his Nature du signe linguistique.
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