Gustave Guillaume

Who was Gustave Guillaume?

Gustave Guillaume, is a French linguist and philologist, originator of the linguistic theory known as "psychomechanics".

Guillaume was introduced to linguistics by the comparative grammarian Antoine Meillet, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure. He became well-versed in the historical and comparative method and adopted its mentalist tradition and systemic view of language. In his first major publication, Le problème de l’article et sa solution dans la langue française, Guillaume set out to apply the comparative method to the uses of the articles in Modern French, in order to describe their mental system located in the preconscious mind of the speaker rather than in pre-historical time. He was to pursue his research into the system of articles for the next 20 years.

In 1929, with Temps et Verbe, he described how the systems of aspect, mood and tense operate to produce an image of time proper to the event that is expressed by a verb in a sentence.