Survey of the Dialect Material in Lucien Tesnière’s Personal Fonds

Young researcher Miha Sušnik from the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language at ZRC SAZU visited the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits) in Paris from October 21 to 26, 2024. During his visit, he surveyed the Slovenian dialect material found in the archival collection of Lucien Tesnière. This marks the first step toward acquiring his valuable dialect material that could enhance our understanding of Slovenian dialects and their historical development.

Lucien Tesnière (1893–1956) was a French linguist, later known primarily for his posthumously published work Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Elements of Structural Syntax, 1959). However, for Slovenians, his first major research endeavor is of greater importance: a linguistic-geographical study of the dual in Slovenian. During his stay in Ljubljana, where he was invited in 1920 as a lecturer of French at the newly established University of Ljubljana and lived with the support of a French scholarship until 1924, Tesnière worked on his doctoral dissertation on the Slovenian dual number, a topic proposed by his mentor Antoine Meillet. The dissertation, titled Les formes du duel en slovène (The Forms of the Dual in Slovenian), along with the accompanying Atlas linguistique pour servir à l’étude du duel en slovène (Linguistic Atlas for the Study of the Dual in Slovenian), was published in book form in 1925. Tesnière continued to engage with the Slovenian language, history, and literature even after leaving Ljubljana, and in 1953, he became a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU).

Tesnière approached the dual number from a diachronic perspective, treating the Slovenian language comprehensively—not only the contemporary literary language but also, and especially, historical sources and Slovenian dialects. For the dialectological part of his work, he drew inspiration from the Atlas linguistique de la France by Jules Gilléron and Edmond Edmont. Tesnière created a network of locations and a dialectological questionnaire, which he used during his travels through Slovenian-speaking areas in 1921–1922 to collect dialect material. He personally collected material from 87 of the 284 points in his network, while for the remaining points, he relied on already published material. The questionnaire, comprising 424 questions, was divided into two parts: the first focused on determining the phonetic and morphological characteristics of the local dialect and the rules of its phonetic development, while the second was dedicated to the dual. While Tesnière used the collected material in his dissertation and linguistic articles on Slovenian dialects, he never published it in its entirety. His questionnaire, too, was only partially presented in the introduction to the Atlas. Both the dialect material and the questionnaire in its entirety have been preserved in his personal archive.

Tesnière’s dialect material is significant not only because of the time of its recording—the national project Slovenski lingvistični atlas (SLA), undertaken by the Department of Dialectology of the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language at ZRC SAZU, did not begin until 1946—but also because of the documentation of local dialects for which little or no material was gathered before and since then, such as in Dobova, Družmirje, Šentilj pod Turjakom, Pódgorje, Vareja, Markovci and Dornava near Ptuj, Gabrje near Rogatec, and Ivanci in Prekmurje. The network of 87 points recorded using his questionnaire is, considering the number of points, relatively well-distributed across the Slovenian linguistic territory. Furthermore, the material is valuable due to the nature of the questionnaire, whose questions, unlike those of other dialectological questionnaires used to collect Slovenian dialect material, appear almost exclusively in multi-word phrases or sentences, enabling the observation of syntactic features in local dialects.