Emile Benveniste

Emile Benveniste was a French linguist and one of the leading structuralist theorists of language in the twentieth century. In his two-volume Problemes de linguistique generale, published in 1966 and 1974, Benveniste developed an influential theory of enunciation, examining how a speaker's use of pronouns, tense and deictic expressions constitutes subjectivity within language itself, work that influenced later developments in linguistics, philosophy and literary theory. Benveniste's Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes, published in 1969, used comparative philological method to reconstruct the social, economic, legal and religious institutions of early Indo-European speaking peoples from the vocabulary preserved across their descendant languages. Benveniste held the chair of comparative grammar at the College de France from 1937, a position previously held by Antoine Meillet, and he specialized in Iranian and other Indo-European languages alongside his broader theoretical work.