Temporalité & Spatialisation, Guillaume & Psychomécanique

Gustave Guillaume devised a linguistic theory that is the perfect continuation and absolute expansion of what Meillet, Saussure, and Benveniste at times envisioned or understood without seeing the limitless possibilities some of their ideas may open. Guillaume has thus built psychomechanics as a theory that can capture the use of language in any situation as a human psychological and communicational creative activity. He is interested in discovering what the speaker intended to express and how this intention is cast into the formal apparatus of one particular language to produce a message which becomes an effective expression that supposedly corresponds to the intention of the speaker. But that is when it all starts getting tricky and interesting. There is practically never one meaning behind even one single word, at least not for everyone at the same time in the whole world. Just ask 8 billion people to draw a dog or draw a bird and you’ll see the differences.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU