Eric Buyssens (1900-2000)

by Gilbert Debusscher and Jean-Pierre van Noppen (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Eric Jean Louis Buyssens was born in Ghent (Belgium) on July 6th, 1900. He married Suzanne König in 1925, by whom he had a son, Frédéric (1931-1978). After Suzanne's demise (1966), he married Alice Gibert in 1967. He became a Corresponding Member of the Class of Letters of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1972, a full Member of the Academy in 1983, and Chairman of the Class in 1984. He passed away at the age of one hundred years in Brussels (Belgium), on July 19th, 2000.

Eric Buyssens was the third child in a family of five. His father Adolphe Buyssens and his mother Anna Merlin gave him a Protestant education, but Eric, unable to believe in the existence of God, proclaimed himself an atheist; yet he remained sensitive to matters of faith and truth, as can be read in the short, unpublished 60-page autobiography he wrote towards the end of his life.

The young Eric Buyssens graduated from the Athénée de Bruxelles and started reading Germanic Philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. After two years of candidature and two years of doctorat, according to the terminology prevailing at the time, he received the degree of Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres. His doctoral dissertation on Calvinism in Spenser's Faerie Queene was to give rise to the publication of his first paper in 1926. In the late twenties, Eric Buyssens wrote a few other literary papers ("Les sept saintes de Bernard Shaw"), but his continued interest in the nature of allegories, symbols, and signs ("The Symbolism in the Faerie Queene", 1930), was to orient his thought towards questions in general linguistics as well as towards issues in grammar, the latter conceivably under the impetus of his prolonged activity as a teacher of Germanic languages in several secondary schools (1924-1956). It is in the library of one of these schools that Buyssens discovered Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale, a milestone work which had not been mentioned to him during his philological and literary training at the University. The discovery was to determine much of his later career as a thinker and scholar. In 1943, he published an insightful synthesis of his thoughts and readings in Les langages et le discours, essai de linguistique fonctionnelle dans le cadre de la sémiologie, a booklet which would establish his reputation as a linguist both in Belgium and abroad, and in which he developed his views on the nature of the sign, on human linguistic communication and Saussurean functionalism. Function was a key term including, but not limited to the syntactic functions inherent in language structure ("l'idée de fonction devient ici, comme dans toutes les sciences, l'idée fondamentale : toute notion, y compris celle de l'être, de substance, naît d'une fonction, et c'est la fonction qui permet seule de définir la notion"); and Buyssens felt the notion could and should be extended to the level of discourse : "Le discours est la partie fonctionnelle de la parole" [...] "C'est le point de vue fonctionnel qui permet de distinguer les faits sémiques de ceux qui ne le sont pas" (1943: 6-7, 30, 94). A revised and considerably expanded version appeared in 1967 under the title La communication et l'articulation linguistique, with new chapters on phonology and new insights gained from sociology.

Thomas Sebeok, in his Contribution to the Doctrine of Signs was to pay a tribute to Eric Buyssens' role as a pioneer in the field of semiology :

"In the decades that followed the publication of Saussure's Cours, linguists were too busy with problems internal to their discipline - particularly those attendant on the development of structuralism - to pay more than perfunctory attention to semiotics, although some linguistically oriented scholars, working in adjacent disciplines and concerned with questions of foundations, made fertile exploratory contributions to sign systems other than languages [...] more or less inspired by general principles of semiotic analysis. One of the rare exceptions was the Belgian linguist Eric Buyssens, who undertook a serious, original and comprehensive essay to realize 'le voeu de Saussure' to confront languages with other (human) sign systems. Buyssens introduces the term seme, defining this as 'tout procédé idéal dont la réalisation permet la communication', the adjective semic and the phrase semic act, meaning the concrete embodiment of a seme."

Buyssens classified semes according to the sensory modality or modalities involved, and as intrinsic (iconically and/or indexically motivated), or extrinsic, where the relationship between form and meaning of a given seme exists only with a view to communication and is "arbitrary" in Saussure's sense. Sebeok concludes:

"The well-argued, adequately illustrated, if somewhat quaint booklet of Buyssens has been virtually ignored by other linguists, possibly because of its appearance during World War II; nevertheless, it still repays careful reading";

 Although the booklet would undoubtedly have deserved wider distribution and acclaim, it did make Eric Buyssens the most renowned Belgian linguist of his time. Indeed, Sebeok qualified the "slender masterpiece" as a "miniature classic" characterized by "limpidity of style, critical discernment, and captivating devotion to the subject matter", and described it as one of the "twin keys" giving "immediate access to semiotics" together with Morris' Signs, Language and Behavior , while Hjelmslev referred to it as "a comprehensive attempt at a general semiology ".  Buyssens' work contributed significantly to the spread and acceptance of the term sémiologie throughout linguistic discourse in the French-speaking world. It sparked an interest in semiology and initiated a new Saussure-inspired movement, which earned Buyssens the assiduous collaboration of Luis Prieto and the Geneva School.

Les langages et le discours was to play a decisive role in Buyssens' designation as the Belgian member on the Board of the International Semiotics Association. It also earned him his first University appointment When after the war, classes resumed in 1945, Buyssens was called upon by the Université Libre de Bruxelles to teach Sociology of Language and Historical Grammar of English; but he was to be granted full-time tenure only in 1956, after taking over Adolphe Van Loey's courses in Gothic, Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages, and Language Teaching Methodology. Though mainly a functionalist in the Saussurean tradition, Eric Buyssens remained a philologist by training, and made a point of basing any claims, whether in General Linguistics or in English Grammar, on the observation of real linguistic data gathered in a corpus ("pour connaître le discours, le linguiste doit étudier la parole", 1943:32) although corpora were small and hand-processed at the time. It is Buyssens' fundamental commitment to the inductive paradigm that sparked the fierce controversy which in the late sixties opposed him to Noam Chomsky and the more speculative approaches of the transformational-generativist school.

Eric Buyssens retired in 1970 but remained active as a scholar after that, well into his eighties and nineties. In his last book, Epistémologie de la phonématique , he summarized in a striking formula the philosophy underpinning his scholarly work : "Mon fil conducteur a toujours été la fonction que les unités linguistiques remplissent dans la communication volontaire." (1980:7). The role of the sign in deliberate vs. involuntary communication also awakened his interest in the communicative behaviour of animals, an issue to which he would have liked to devote more time and research, and which takes up almost as much space in his short unpublished autobiography as questions of grammar and general linguistics.

Eric Buyssens was not a man who sought or was fond of honours, but who could accept them with good grace when they were conferred upon him. He became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy in 1972, Chairman of the Linguistic Society of Belgium and of the Belgian Association for Applied Linguistics, and an honorary member of the American Society of Semiotics. He was offered a Chair at the Sorbonne, which he was forced to refuse for administrative reasons. On his 70th birthday he was presented with a volume in his honour, Linguistique Contemporaine, edited by his colleagues Yvan Lebrun and Jean Dierickx. The contributions to this Festschrift reflect the international fame enjoyed by the great Belgian linguist.

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