Sechehaye, Albert

Born July 4, 1870, in Geneva; died there July 2, 1946. Swiss linguist.

Sechehaye graduated from the University of Geneva and in 1902 received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Göttingen. He became a privatdocent at the University of Geneva in 1902 and a professor there in 1929. From 1941 to 1946 he was president of the Geneva School of General Linguistics. A student of F. de Saussure’s, Sechehaye investigated the theory of language, the logical structure of the sentence, the combination of the individual and the social in linguistic facts, and the problem of the linguistic sign; he was the first to set forth the views of the Geneva school. He advanced the idea of the pregrammatical affective individual elements of expression, which were transformed into grammatical signs regarded in isolation (associative grammar) and in combinations (syntagmatic grammar). Proceeding from the concept of the mutual conditionality of language and speech, he proposed a study of the functioning of language (“the linguistics of organized speech”) to stand alongside static and evolutionary linguistics.