Lucien Tesnière

Lucien Tesnière was a renowned linguist who developed a theory called “dependency grammar,” which explains how words in a sentence relate to each other. He viewed sentences as structured hierarchies where a central word (the main verb) connects to other words that depend on it, forming a tree-like structure. This approach highlights the importance of these relationships in understanding sentence meaning and syntax. Tesnière’s work has influenced modern linguistic analysis by emphasizing the functional links between words, helping us better analyze and understand how language is organized and how sentences are constructed.