Andre Martinet

Andre Martinet was a French linguist who became one of the leading figures of functionalist structural linguistics, an approach analyzing language structure in terms of the communicative functions its elements serve. Martinet is best known for his concept of double articulation, also called duality of patterning, the observation that human language is organized simultaneously at two distinct levels, a first level of meaningful units such as words and morphemes, and a second, lower level made of a small inventory of meaningless sound units, phonemes, that combine to build those meaningful units, a property Martinet argued gives human language much of its expressive economy and flexibility compared to animal communication systems. In his influential 1955 book Economie des changements phonetiques, Economy of Phonetic Changes, he argued that historical sound change in language is shaped by a general tension between two competing pressures, the drive toward ease of articulation for the speaker and the need to preserve enough distinct contrasts for the listener to understand, a functionalist explanation for patterns of language change that had often previously been described only descriptively. Martinet also directed the International Auxiliary Language Association's work on the constructed auxiliary language Interlingua for several years and long edited the journal La Linguistique, and his general linguistics textbook, Elements de linguistique generale, became a standard reference used widely across French-speaking linguistics programs.