Open AccessOn Tesnière on the dual
Author(s) -
Frans Plank
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.134
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2350-420X
pISSN - 0024-3922
DOI - 10.4312/linguistica.34.1.297-298
Subject(s) - dual (grammatical number) , demise , linguistics , history , dual polyhedron , literature , philosophy , art , law , political science , mathematics , pure mathematics
Duals come and go almost everywhere, or have done so some time or other, but it is rare for such events to be chronicled so circumstantially as Lucien Tesnière did for Slovenian in his well-known chef-d'oeuvre of 1925. Tesniere's chief interest was to collect enough information to be able to chart comprehensively the dual's demise and partial renaissance in the varietie of Slovenian, dialectal as well as literary, and to identify the changes concerned as phonological, morphological (in particular analogical), or syntactic. Although he would sometimes compare Slovenian patterns and developments to others, especially Slavonic and Indo-European ones, he was reluctant to draw general conclusions from the particulars so amply at his disposal other than implicitly, occasionally hinting at "tendences" or "causes profondes" supposedly giving direction to the vagaries of phonetics and morphology.