A Look at Tesnière's Éléments through the Lens of Modern Syntactic Theory

A recent project to produce a much belated English translation of Lucien Tesnière’s Éléments de syntaxe structurale has provided the opportunity for an in depth look at Tesnière’s theory of syntax. This contribution examines a few aspects of Tesnière’s work through the lens of modern syntactic theory. Tesnière’s understandings of constituents and phrases, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, gapping, right node raising, propositional infinitives, and exocentric structures are all briefly considered. Concerning some of these areas, we see that Tesnière was visionary with his analysis, whereas in other areas, modern syntactic theory now rejects his account. Of particular interest is the fact that Tesnière’s theory was not entirely dependency-based. His account of transfer (Fr. translation) acknowledged exocentric structures, which means his system was also employing constituency. In this regard, one can, surprisingly, classify Tesnière’s theory as a hybrid dependency-constituency grammar.