Lucien Tesniere. Syntaxe structurale et operations mentales

The Strasbourg colloquium "Structural Syntax and Mental Processes" took place from September 22-25, 1993 and assembled French and German scholars working in Germanic and Romance studies directly or indirectly influenced by Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954). The proceedings consist of 27 papers on the life, work and influence of this scholar and testify to the unbroken vitality of his thinking and the multiplicity of his concerns. The articles demonstrate that it is no longer possible to reduce Tesnière's work to the central concepts of valency and dependency alone. On the contrary, his scholarly oeuvre represents a comprehensive theoretical foundation for the mental reconstruction of linguistic facts. Only recently however has there been appreciation of the full range of its implications and an attendant attempt to develop those implications further.