Henri Wittmann
Encyclopedia
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
from Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
. He is best known for his work on Quebec French
Quebec French
Quebec French , or Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language in Canada, in its formal and informal registers. Quebec French is used in everyday communication, as well as in education, the media, and government....
.
Biography
Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann was born in AlsaceAlsace
Alsace is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area , and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km²...
in 1937. After studying with André Martinet
André Martinet
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential by his work on structural linguistics....
at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
, he exiled himself to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
, the University of Alberta
University of Alberta
The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...
in Edmonton, the University of Windsor
University of Windsor
The University of Windsor is a public comprehensive and research university in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's southernmost university. It has a student population of approximately 15,000 full-time and part-time undergraduate students and over 1000 graduate students...
and McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
before teaching in the French university system of Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
The Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières , established in 1969 is a campus of the Université du Québec, located in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. The university has 12,500 students in 8 different campuses, including the main one in Trois-Rivières. About 1000 of them come from overseas, from 60...
and at Rimouski
Université du Québec à Rimouski
The Université du Québec à Rimouski is a branch of the Université du Québec in Rimouski, Quebec. There is also a campus of the university in Lévis, Quebec, recently moved to a newly constructed building. Founded in 1969, UQAR is one of the most modern in Quebec.This university is well-known for its...
as well as the University of Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at Carleton University
Carleton University
Carleton University is a comprehensive university located in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. The enabling legislation is The Carleton University Act, 1952, S.O. 1952. Founded as a small college in 1942, Carleton now offers over 65 programs in a diverse range of disciplines. Carleton has...
in Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
.
As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to the study of the morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of a number of languages and language families: Pre-Indo-European, Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
(Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, Italic
Italic languages
The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin , and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and Latin.In the past various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed...
, Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, Creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
), Afro-Asiatic ( Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
), African (Mande
Mande
Mande may refer to:* Mandé peoples of western Africa* Mande languages* Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka* Garo people of northeastern India and northern Bangladesh...
, Kwa, Bantu
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
), Austronesian (Malagasy
Malagasy language
Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, a member of the Austronesian family of languages. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere.-History:...
, Polynesian
Polynesian languages
The Polynesian languages are a language family spoken in the region known as Polynesia. They are classified as part of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Oceanic branch of that family. They fall into two branches: Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian. Polynesians share many cultural traits...
), Amerindian (Arawakan, Cariban). His work between 1963 and 2002 includes more than 140 items.
He is a life member since 1962 of the Linguistic Society of America
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
(LSA). In 1965, he cofounded with André Rigault and Douglas Ellis the Linguistics Department at McGill University. In 1981, he was the cofounder, with Normand Beauchemin and Robert Fournier, of the Linguistic Society of Quebec (Association québécoise de linguistique
Association québécoise de linguistique
The is an academic organization devoted to the scientific study of human language, and is a professional society for Francophone linguistic researchers in North America and beyond.The AQL was formed in 1981...
) which he served for 10 years as president, secretary general and organizer of the annual meeting. In 1981 as well, he became the first Editor of the Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée
Association québécoise de linguistique
The is an academic organization devoted to the scientific study of human language, and is a professional society for Francophone linguistic researchers in North America and beyond.The AQL was formed in 1981...
, a responsibility he assumed for the following 20 years.
Politically, Wittmann is known for his anarcho-syndicalist sympathies with strong links to the CNTU (Confederation of National Trade Unions
Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux
The Confédération des syndicats nationaux , is the second largest trade union federation in Quebec by membership.- History :...
), communautary and anti-war movements. In 1974-1978, he was at the center of a union conflict at the University of Quebec which changed the landscape of collective bargaining in the academic world. A specialist of the linguistic heritage of Quebec, he also is a stout defender of Quebec independence.
Contributions to linguistics
Henri Wittmann is no doubt the first modern linguist to have studied the non-standard forms of Quebec FrenchQuebec French
Quebec French , or Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language in Canada, in its formal and informal registers. Quebec French is used in everyday communication, as well as in education, the media, and government....
(notably Joual
Joual
Joual is the common name for the linguistic features of basilectal Quebec French that are associated with the French-speaking working class in Montreal which has become a symbol of national identity for a large number of artists from that area...
, Magoua
Magoua
Magoua , which may derive from a word in an Algonquian language which means loon, is a particular dialect of basilectal Quebec French spoken in the Trois-Rivières area, between Trois-Rivières and Maskinongé. Long before a military fort was constructed there, Trois-Rivières became in 1615 the...
and Chaouin) in a theory-orientated
Generative linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...
and comparative
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
framework.
In a general way, Wittmann, a student of André Martinet
André Martinet
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential by his work on structural linguistics....
in the fifties, has been the first to apply the latter's principles of chain reaction
Chain reaction
A chain reaction is a sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place. In a chain reaction, positive feedback leads to a self-amplifying chain of events....
s in phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
to inflectional morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
. In Wittmann's view, the basic structure of the sentence is held together by functional
Functional
Generally, functional refers to something able to fulfill its purpose or function.*Functionalism and Functional form, movements in architectural design*Functional group, certain atomic combinations that occur in various molecules, e.g...
items, with the lexical items filling in the blanks. Position in functional space must maintain functional equidistance and disturbances in functional equidistance set off error correcting chain reactions that are cyclical
Frequency
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...
in nature and subject to drift
Drift (linguistics)
There are two types of linguistic drift, a unidirectional short-term and cyclic long-term drift.-Short-term unidirectional drift:According to Sapir, drift is the unconscious change in natural language...
. Thus, functionally salient lexical items will eventually set off a push chain conveyor belt pressure in functional space, sending functionally close-by affixes down the path of attrition. Such is the origin of agglutinating clitics of non-standard oral French from erstwhile lexical pronouns, setting off the attrition of functionally equivalent fusional means of inflection inherited from Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
: Loss of suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
al inflection on the verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
, compensated by the rise of proclitic means indicating person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
and tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
. Conversely, functional items going down the path of attrition leave behind functional gaps, triggering a drag chain effect on surrounding functionally salient lexical items. Such is the origin of the agglutinating prenominal class
Noun class
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...
markers
Marker (linguistics)
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not...
from erstwhile articles
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
, compensated by the rise of postnominal means of expressing definiteness
Definiteness
In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
on the noun. With the fulfilment of each cycle of change, a morphologically consistent phonological representation is realized which serves as input to the next cycle of morphological change. The aforementioned processes of inflectional renewal are not without parallels in recent neurolinguistic research, notably in the works by Gabriele Miceli.
Let's assume (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) to be equivalent expressions of "I was eating" and "I was sick" in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
, written Standard French
Standard French
Standard French is an unofficial term for a standard variety of the French language...
, oral Québec French
Quebec French
Quebec French , or Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language in Canada, in its formal and informal registers. Quebec French is used in everyday communication, as well as in education, the media, and government....
and Haitian Creole French
Haitian Creole language
Haitian Creole language , often called simply Creole or Kreyòl, is a language spoken in Haiti by about twelve million people, which includes all Haitians in Haiti and via emigration, by about two to three million speakers residing in the Bahamas, Cuba, Canada, France, Cayman Islands, French...
.
(1)a (ego) ede-ba-m
(1)b (ego) in morbo er-a-m
(2)a (jo) manj-oi-e
(2)b (jo) malades est-oi-e
(3)a je mange-ai-s
(3)b j'ét-ai-s malade
(4)a (moué) ch-tà-àprà-manjé / ch-tà-àprà-manjé (moué)
(4)b (moué) ch-tà-màlàd / ch-tà-màlàd (moué)
(5)a mouen Ø-t-ap-manjé
(5)b mouen Ø-te-malad
Though etymologically
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
analyzable as
Georges Dor
Georges Dor was a Québécois author, composer, playwright, singer, poet, translator, and theatrical producer and director....
, a non-linguist, came independently to the same conclusions. The residual function of ch- is that of agreement
Agreement (linguistics)
In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
with the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
moué, which in Creole varieties of French pursues its path of attrition to zero. The particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
tà/te pursues its separate existence as a tense marker in all varieties of colonial French.
In Quebec French and other non-Creole varieties of colonial French, object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
agreement varies with postnominal la as expressions of definiteness on the noun.
(6)a j-l-oué l-ab(-la) (moué) "(I) AGRs-AGRo-see CLASS-tree-the (Sg.)"
(6)b j-é-oué éz-ab-(la) (moué) "(I) AGRs-AGRo-see CLASS-tree-the (Pl.)"
In Creole varieties of French (except for the Seychellois Creole
Seychellois Creole
Seychellois Creole, also known as Kreol or Seselwa, is the French-based creole language of the Seychelles. It shares official language status with English and French ....
), postnominal la, derived from an erstwhile adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
"there", survives as the only means of expressing definiteness. The agglutination of the etymological articles le, la, les as class markers on nouns concording with the agreement features on verbs from erstwhile pronouns gives the language an exotic, bantu-like look.
(7)a n-a-u-ona m-ti "(I) AGRs-PRESENT-AGRo CLASS-tree (Sg.)"
(7)b n-a-i-ona mi-ti "(I) AGRs-PRESENT-AGRo CLASS-tree (Pl.)"
Noun class clitics pursue in creole varieties of French the path of attrition to zero or relative opaqueness
Opaque context
An opaque context is a linguistic context in which it is not always possible to substitute co-referential expressions salva veritate. In other words, substitution of co-referential expressions into an opaque context does not always preserve truth...
though transparency
Transparency (linguistic)
Linguistic transparency is a phrase which is used in multiple, overlapping subjects in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language...
survives notably in the distribution of prenomal z-/l-: Creole nouns with z- turn up in Québec French as vowel-initial masculine
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
nouns, with l- as vowel-initial feminine
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
nouns. Article agglutination is incipient in French since the Middle Ages as can be shown conclusively from French "lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
" texts in Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
transliteration.
Wittmann's comparative approach to studying colonial varieties of French from Québec, the Americas and the Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
reveals that the structural gap with written French is inherent in the variety of oral French reflecting the speech of Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
exported from the cities of Northern France from the early 17th century onwards. The doubling of DP positions as agreement features and varying degrees of restrictions on verb movement
Transformational grammar
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the Chomskyan tradition of phrase structure grammars...
are the only noteworthy developmental features that separate non-Creole varieties from Creole varieties of French. With his student Robert Fournier, Wittmann debunked within the same theoretical framework the extravagant African-origin hypotheses of Haitian Creole French by Claire Lefebvre and similar far-fetched theories. In the end, neither the non-creole koine nor the creole varieties of colonial French turn out to be "Creoles" in the sense that Creolists would have it. They are both outcomes of "normal" processes of linguistic change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
and grammaticalization.
Wittmann also contributed significantly to the study of other languages, notably languages that are claimed to be substratal
Substratum
In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...
to different varieties of Creole French
French-based creole languages
A French Creole, or French-based Creole language, is a creole language based on the French language, more specifically on a 17th century koiné French extant in Paris, the French Atlantic harbors, and the nascent French colonies...
(Ewe
Ewe language
Ewe is a Niger–Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by approximately six million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, spoken in southeastern Ghana, Togo, and parts of Benin. Other Gbe languages include Fon, Gen, Phla Phera, and Aja...
, Yoruba
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
, Mande
Mande languages
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Bissa, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Yacouba, Vai, and Ligbi...
, Bantu
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, Malagasy
Malagasy language
Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, a member of the Austronesian family of languages. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere.-History:...
, Arawakan, Cariban).
External links
- Site honoring Henri Wittmann : with an extensive bibliography and free access to some of his most important writings.
- Archives Henri Wittmann : selected writings.
- Entry in Linguistlist