L'uomo di Benveniste. Linguistica, antropologia e sociologia nel dibattito francese della seconda metà del Novecento

This thesis's project is about the anthropological perspective of Émile Benveniste, i.e. his look at the complex relationship between man-subject, language and society. We analyze primarily Benveniste's works of historical linguistics, in order to underline the link between the general reflexions on language contained in his Problèmes de linguistique générale and his grammatical study of the single, historically determined languages. The first chapter of the thesis deals with biographical notices about the less-known childhood years of Benveniste, until his college years. The second one addresses two notions that are crucial to understand his ethnosemantics works of the 1930s and 1940s: namely the trifunctional structure of society and the phraseology. The third chapter is dedicated to the intertwining of historical linguistics and general linguistics into two of his major works (Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen [1935] and Noms d'agent et noms d'action en indo-européen [1946]) and in a less-known piece which was not signed, an «Aperçu historique» published in 1937. The fourth chapter focuses on the influence of Marcel Mauss and Antoine Meillet's body of work on Benveniste, as well as on Benveniste and Franz Boas' analyses on personal pronouns. The fifth one details the foundation of the anthropological journal L'Homme by Benveniste and Claude Lévi-Strauss, where were published Lévi-Strauss and Algirdas Julien Greimas' structural analyses of the myth. Finally, the sixth chapter is dedicated to a close inspection of Benveniste's last masterpiece, the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes: the goal is to uncover the general reflection which underlies his analyses of specific occurrences in languages.