1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Émile 
Benveniste
(French: 
[emil 
bɛ
̃venist]; 27 May 1902 – 3 October 1976) was 
a French structural linguist and semiotician. He 
is best known for his work on Indo-European 
languages and his critical reformulation of the 
linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de 
Saussure. 
Benveniste was born in Aleppo, Aleppo 
Vilayet, Ottoman Syria to a Sephardi family. 
His father sent him to Paris to undertake 
rabbinical studies, but he left the Rabbinical 
School after receiving his baccalauréat, and enrolled in the École 
pratique des hautes études. There he studied under Antoine Meillet, a 
former student of Saussure, and Joseph Vendryes, completing his 
degree in 1920. He would return to the École pratique des hautes études 
in 1927 as a director of studies, and would receive his doctorate there 
in 1935, with his major thesis on the formation of noun roots, and his 

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secondary thesis on the Avestan infinitive. Following Meillet's death in 
1936, he was elected to the Chair of Comparative Grammar in the 
Collège de France in 1937. He held his seat at the Collège de France 
until his death, but ceased lecturing in December 1969, after suffering 
a stroke that left him aphasic. Earlier that year he had been elected as 
the first President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 
and stayed nominally in that position until 1972. Benveniste died in a 
nursing home in Versailles, aged 74. 
At the start of his career, his highly specialised and technical work 
limited his influence to a small circle of scholars. In the late thirties, he 
aroused some controversy for challenging the influential Saussurian 
notion of the sign, that posited a binary distinction between the phonic 
shape of any given word (signifier) and the idea associated with it 
(signified). Saussure argued that the relationship between the two was 
psychological, and purely arbitrary. Benveniste challenged this model 
in his Nature du signe linguistique. 
The publication of his monumental text, Problèmes de 
linguistique générale or Problems in General Linguistics, would elevate 
his position to much wider recognition. The two volumes of this work 
appeared in 1966 and 1974 respectively. The book exhibits not only 
scientific rigour but also a lucid style accessible to the layman, 
consisting of various writings culled from a period of more than twenty-
five years. In Chapter 5, Animal Communication and Human 
Language, Benveniste repudiated behaviourist linguistic interpretations 
by demonstrating that human speech, unlike the so-called languages of 
bees and other animals, cannot be merely reduced to a stimulus-
response system.