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Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta
[Studies in Language Companion Series 212] 2020
► pp. 253–276

Chapter 8
The Russian trail

Dmitrievsky, the little drama metaphor and dependency grammar

| Université de Lausanne & State University of Saint-Petersburg
L. Tesnière is not the first inventor of dependency grammars. In fact, a “climate of opinion” can be formed without any direct contact in time and space between linguists who do not know each other but came to similar views because they met the same problems and were dissatisfied with the Subject/Predicate scheme of classical grammars. A comparison of L. Tesnière and A. Dmitrievsky is proposed here to reconstruct the multiple ways which led to the idea of dependency grammars, around the technical obstacle of impersonal syntactic structures.
Article outline
  • 1.“Plato’s theorem”, object of stigmatization
  • 2.Tesnière, reader of Humboldt
  • 3.Dmitrievsky and anti-nominativism
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.09ser
References (65)
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