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LANGUAGE IN THE MIND

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Language in the Mind
An Introduction
to Guillaume’s Theory
WALTER HIRTLE
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston
•London• Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007
isbn978-0-7735-3263-2
Legal deposit third quarter 2007
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Science sand Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge
the ﬁnancial support of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing
activities.
The original versions of chapters 2 and 4 were published by Mouton de
Gruyter and John Benjamins respectively. The present versions appear
here with their permission.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hirtle, W. H. (Walter Heal), 1927–
Language in the mind: an introduction to Guillaume's theory /
Walter Hirtle.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn978-0-7735-3263-2
1. English language – Grammar -- Theory, etc. 2. Guillaume, Gustave,
1883-1960.3. Cognitive grammar. 4. Linguistics. i. Title.
p121.h556 2007 425.01 c2007-902617-6
Typeset in New Baskerville 10.5/13
by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

To Roch Valin
mentor and friend

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Contents
Preface ix
1Introduction3
2Language and the Ability to Speak18
3Words, Words, Words30
4Meaning: Representing Experience51
5A System for Representing66
6The Method of Analysis in Psychosystematics85
7The Substantive: A System of Subsystems106
8The Substantive and the System of the Parts of Speech120
9SomeandAny140
10The System of the Verb155
11Auxiliaries: How Do They Help?174
12The Proof of the Pudding189
13The Noun Phrase201
14Concord, Discord, and the Incidence of Verb to Subject213
15Thought and Language225
16Conclusion237
Glossary243

viii Contents
Notes247
Bibliography263
Index271

Preface
The work of Gustave Guillaume is little known outside of France,
partly because of his obscure life (see below) and partly because
he published relatively little during his lifetime (see Tollis, 191),
but mainly because he adopted a point of view that was quite new
to his contemporaries and that, even today, is still unfamiliar to
many linguists. Seen in retrospect, part of this originality was due
to the fact that from the outset he integrated into his approach
three currents of linguistic research that were to mark the twenti-
eth century. His work reﬂects both the descriptivist’s concern for
precise and extensive observation of real usage and the theoreti-
cian’s preoccupation with ﬁnding the explanatory principles lying
behind usage, the structures or universals permitting us to under-
stand what is observed. Furthermore, his constant focus was on the
mental reality of language, leading one reviewer to remark that
Guillaume in the 1940s, like cognitivists today, was seeking “to
explain the properties of language in terms of general cognitive
mechanisms” (Epstein, 308). What enabled him to combine these
three elements into a uniﬁed approach to language was the
method of analysis he adopted – the comparative method – but
applied to language in synchrony.
Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale had divided the study of
language into separate disciplines: diachronic and synchronic.
Guillaume attempted to unite them into a single science through
the method of analysis so successfully applied in the great nine-
teenth-century studies to language in historical time. Only in 1929
with his Temps et verbe did he succeed in applying the comparative

x Preface
method to language in cognitive time, the cognitive time of the
speaker during the act of speech. The result was a view of language
as a mental reality, something we acquire thanks to our linguistic
forbears and exploit according to the needs and circumstances of
the moment. For many scholars of his day, however, this view con-
stituted a challenge, requiring them to accept that a great many
things happen in the speaker’s mind during the present of speech,
the present instant.
Throughout his ﬁfty-year career as a linguist, Guillaume worked
at developing his initial insight into a general theory and typology
of human language, each year adding some new hypothesis, rework-
ing some former analysis, providing more evidence for a given the-
oretical stand. Although he worked incessantly, the abundant
documents he left contain no text for introducing the interested
reader to his approach. Furthermore, most of his examples are
drawn from his mother tongue, French, and this makes it even less
accessible to most speakers of English. This then is the purpose of
the present volume: to introduce Guillaume’s theory of language to
the English-speaking reader, illustrating and supporting it with
examples drawn from contemporary English. Comments from
scholars working in other theoretical frameworks are mentioned as
a means of highlighting Guillaume’s approach, but are not intended
to constitute a systematic comparison with any other theory.
Any merits this introduction may have are due largely to discus-
sions with students and colleagues at the Fonds Gustave Guillaume
in Quebec City, particularly during the weekly research seminar
instituted there over forty years ago by Roch Valin. I am especially
grateful to Joseph Pattee, Dennis Philps, Patrick Dufﬂey, John
Hewson, Ronald Lowe, and to the late Bob Uhlenbeck, as well as
unnamed readers, for comments on earlier versions of this volume.
And like most of those who have made the effort to explore
Guillaume’s thinking on language, I am most indebted to Roch
Valin for his rigour, encouragement, and vision.

LANGUAGE IN THE MIND

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1
Introduction
A language involves a system where everything ﬁts together and has a
wonderfully rigorous design.
Antoine Meillet (cited in Guillaume 1989,57)
AN OBSCURE LIFE: 1883–1960
It will help to bring out the originality of Guillaume’s work if we
take a moment to situate him in the linguistic tradition of France
at the beginning of the twentieth century. Guillaume’s life was, in
his own eyes, an obscure one (passée dans l’ombre
1
). His father, a
talented painter, died when Guillaume was still a child. Little is
known of his mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1926.
School reports for the years 1891 to 1896 from the École Milton
in Paris are the only record of his schooling until his name appears
on the register of the École pratique des Hautes Études in 1914.
A twelve-part Méthode Guillaume, handwritten in Russian but with a
printed cover, for preparing teachers of French in Russia, dates
probably from around 1905 and witnesses to his knowledge of
Russian. Giving lessons to Russian émigrés was the stimulus for his
lifelong interest in the article in French because of the need to
ﬁnd a means of explaining its use.
The turning point in his professional life came in 1909 when he
was working in a Paris bank where Antoine Meillet had his account.
Meillet, impressed by Guillaume’s good general background in
science, philosophy, and the arts, and especially his lively interest
in language, encouraged him to undertake a career as a linguist
with the aim of extending linguistics so that the same method of
analysis could be applied to both the historical and the contempo-
rary, or descriptive, dimensions. This is what Guillaume undertook
in his ﬁrst properly linguistic writings, three short studies published

4 Language in the Mind
in1911,1912, and 1913. The reason why Guillaume subsequently
tried to hide these works throws light on all his later career. Accord-
ing to Valin (1994,126) it is because “in this ﬁrst stage of his
research Guillaume appears to have gone astray. Hypnotized by the
frequent necessity of using certain grammatical forms, he tries to
reduce this necessity to the rules of an unconscious logic preceding
conscious logic (in this he is right), but at the same time a universal
logic, a set of fundamental equations applying to all languages,
with the particular logic of each language reﬂecting just one of the
possibilities of treating the terms of one of these primary equa-
tions. This certainly involves a mistaken approach, the mistake
consisting precisely in its overly mathematical aspect. The logic of
language – it does exist – is, as G. Guillaume was to show later, a
sui generis logic which is not the learned logic of mathematics, even
if there are serious reasons to believe that the intuitive sources of
the latter could be in the former.”
Guillaume’s continuing search for a method to analyze this “sui
generis logic” of a language is manifest in his ﬁrst major publication,
on the article in French, which appeared in 1919. Although this
study did not give him what he was looking for, it did pose the
problem in terms of language potential vs language as actualized
in usage, thus setting the stage for his ﬁrst real breakthrough,
published in his 1929 volume, Temps et verbe. The originality of this
work is to describe the main lines of the subconscious system of the
verb in terms of successive moments in the mental process of con-
structing the verb’s conﬁguration of time during the instant of
speech. It remained for him to ﬁnd the same operational insight
for analyzing morphemes, the elements constituting a grammatical
system. This came in the early 1940s, when he ﬁnally found the
method for analyzing the meaning potential of each article,
making it possible to explain the different senses they express, a
method essentially the same as that employed in comparative and
historical studies. Thanks to this method he was able to describe
the article system and to obtain his ﬁrst view of a mental mecha-
nism he was to postulate as the basis for all language systems.
Throughout his remaining years he exploited the avenues of
research opened by this view of language and its systems, and
particularly the relation between languages with radically different
systems for structuring words.

Introduction 5
On the personal side, Guillaume was dogged by illness most of
his life and, after the First World War, lived in economic straits, not
being eligible for a university position since he did not have a
doctorate. He managed to support himself by giving private lessons
and doing proofreading for a publishing house. Only in 1938 did
he get a part-time teaching position at the École pratique des
Hautes Études, where he lectured until the week before his death.
Each of his lectures, usually one a week, sometimes two, occasion-
ally three, was written out as a publishable text. These manuscripts,
along with his many research notes, essays, etc. (some sixty thou-
sand pages of manuscript, around a third of which have been
published so far, in the Leçons de linguistique and the Essais et mémoires
collections
2
) bequeathed to Roch Valin, are now kept in the Fonds
Gustave Guillaume at Laval University in Quebec City.
GUILLAUME AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Fanciful accounts of language origins in some ideal language lost
any appeal they may have had when Sir William Jones read his
paper before the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1786. By declaring the
afﬁnity between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin to be “so strong,
indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which,
perhaps, no longer exists,” he introduced the dimension of time
into matters linguistic to explain observed correspondences that
are “too close to be due to chance” (Bloomﬁeld, 12). He thereby
awakened in anyone curious about human language a perspective
stretching back in history to the earliest texts and even beyond into
the darkness of prehistory. The work of the scholars of the nine-
teenth century retracing developments through time and recon-
structing states of language that no longer exist constitutes the ﬁrst
application to a human institution of scientiﬁc method, with all the
observation of detail and rigour of thought required to reconstruct
in the mind what cannot be observed.
Not the least among the nineteenth-century scholars was Saussure,
who viewed language in a traditional way as basically a set of sym-
bolic units consisting of a sign
3
and what it signiﬁes: the signiﬁcate
or meaning. Moreover, aware that development in time can be
discerned only by comparing the state of a language at different

6 Language in the Mind
historical moments, Saussure proclaimed the need to complement,
with a synchronic or descriptive perspective, the diachronic or his-
torical perspective holding sway at the beginning of the twentieth
century. He is perhaps best remembered for insisting that language
is systematic and that to describe a language at a given moment of
its existence involves describing both usage (la parole) and the
system (la langue). The posthumous publication of his Cours de
linguistique générale in 1916 sparked discussion throughout much
of the twentieth century, particularly with regard to Saussure’s
conception of la langue, language as system.
One of Saussure’s students, Antoine Meillet, known for his vast
knowledge of the Indo-European languages and his authoritative
works on the comparative method, introduced Guillaume to com-
parative grammar and historical linguistics as well as to Saussure’s
thought. He confronted Guillaume with the need to ﬁnd a method
of analysis common to both the historical and the descriptive
approaches to language in order to constitute linguistics as a sci-
ence commensurate with its object. As a consequence Guillaume
never lost sight of the diachronic perspective. He realized that
whatever may be proposed for the contemporary state of a lan-
guage is necessarily the outcome of developments over past gener-
ations. He also took to heart the traditional view that language
units are symbolic, binary, made up of a physical sign tied to a
mental signiﬁcate consisting of a lexical and/or a grammatical
meaning. He was most impressed by Meillet’s insistence that lan-
guage is somehow systematic. Thus, as mentioned above, his ﬁrst
publications in linguistics consisted of three short attempts to sys-
tematize verb tenses and the article on the basis of logic of a
mathematical sort, a point of view he soon abandoned in favour of
an approach based on the coherent relations between meanings,
an approach that today could be called cognitive.
Guillaume also inherited the current view of typology, which
divided languages into three or four types according to the mani-
festations of their morphology: isolating, agglutinative, polysyn-
thetic, and inﬂexional. In the light of the meaning-based approach
he was to adopt, this manner of distinguishing language types by
means of their visible semiology would constitute a challenge for
him to explore the mental conditions producing such variations
in the physical morphology. In fact, in each of these areas –
the relation between language and time (diachrony vs synchrony),

Introduction 7
the relation between sign and signiﬁcate in the units of language,
the relation between usage and system, and the relation between
language types – Guillaume, in search of an all-embracing method,
was soon led far beyond the ideas received from tradition and so
proposed some original views that were not readily accepted by his
contemporaries.
GUILLAUME’S INNOVATIONS
Guillaume undertook to explore the implications of the view,
commonly accepted after Saussure, that language as a grammatical
system exists in synchrony, in the present, by examining the article
in French. He soon realized that the relations between the physical
signs of the morphemes, the symbols themselves, are not system-
atic. “Looking at things from the point of view of the signs, it is
usually impossible to establish that there is a system,” as he put it
later (2004,25). As a consequence, he focused on the signiﬁcates,
attempting to observe a systemic relation between the meaning
expressed by the deﬁnite article and that expressed by the indeﬁ-
nite article. This turned out to be impossible because the sense
each article expresses varies from one use to another. That is,
because of polysemy in the give and take of actual usage, the rela-
tion between a given sign and what it expresses is not constant.
Confronted with the problem of polysemy, the major obstacle for
an approach dealing with meaning, Guillaume realized that,
although variable, the different senses expressed by a given word
are related, like variations on some common theme, and this led
him to the conviction that each word existed in la langue as a
potential meaning whose various actualizations can be observed in
la parole. This notion of a meaning potential, which is at least
implicit in the work of previous scholars, did not reveal the poten-
tial meaning of either article, but it did focus his attention on the
need to ﬁnd a method for discerning it. Moreover, viewing mean-
ing in this potential-actual way gave him a general framework for
explaining polysemy and permitted him to continue exploring the
idea of a language system based on meaning.
Having observed that the system of the articles is not to be found
in usage, in the relations between the signs or between the senses
expressed, Guillaume concluded that the system of the articles
does not emerge into consciousness. This led him to his ﬁrst major

8 Language in the Mind
contribution: that the system exists not in an abstract norm as
Saussure suggested for la langue but as a potential in the mind of
each speaker, albeit far below the level of consciousness. (To dis-
tinguish between these two conceptions of the systemic level of
language, I will retain la langue to designate Saussure’s concept and
use the English term tonguefor Guillaume’s.) Thus he viewed
the relation between a system of morphemes and usage as that
between a potential and its actualizations in the moment of speak-
ing. That is to say, the articles exist as systematically related mean-
ing potentials in the preconscious mind ready to be actualized in
order to express what the speaker has in mind. (Understanding
usage in this way, as what has been actualized, led Guillaume to
substitute the term discourse for Saussure’s parole, since la parole,
speech, as a physical realization, has its own state of existence as a
potential in tongue.)
This view provided Guillaume with a framework, or better, a
general postulate for examining language: tongue exists as a poten-
tial providing what is necessary to produce discourse as the need
arises. For Guillaume, this brought into focus the ﬁrst aim of lin-
guistics: through the observation of discourse, and particularly the
senses expressed by different morphemes, to discern and describe
the preconscious mental systems in tongue. He later called this la
psychosystématique du langage, thepsychosystematics of
language, the study of the mental systems in tongue.
The postulate of tongue as the potential for discourse entailed
another constant in his approach, prompted no doubt by his his-
torical studies and his knowledge of scientiﬁc method. While it is
taken for granted in diachrony that every observed form can be
explained as the result of a prior development, Guillaume’s inno-
vation was to apply the same means for ﬁnding an explanation to
synchrony by seeking in the speaker’s mental system prior devel-
opments or processes that can produce the observed results in
usage.
4
As a consequence, all his work is centred on how the
speaker produces the words and sentences that constitute dis-
course since it is only by describing causal factors, conditions bring-
ing about what we observe, that we can explain it. He realized of
course that grammatical systems are not the only factors condi-
tioning what a speaker says. Besides morphemes there are all the
lexemes of a person’s vocabulary, and these too exist as potentials
in tongue, though not organized in systems the way grammatical

Introduction 9
morphemes are. Moreover the message a speaker has in mind and
wishes to express is necessarily a conditioning factor, but it is outside
language, part of the speaker’s experience.
Reﬂecting on the way the message conditions what is expressed,
Guillaume realized that meaning potentials are exploited in such
a way as to conﬁgure what the speaker has in mind to talk about.
That is, he saw that for each word, the potential lexical meaning
and the potential grammatical meaning(s) are actualized in such
a way as to depict linguistically what constitutes the speaker’s mes-
sage, an insight that later led him to characterize tongue as un
univers regardant, a viewing universe, a mental universe for viewing
our ongoing experience of the universe around us. He therefore
postulated that lexemes and morphemes are means of represent-
ing something in the speaker’s experience. Each word is thus a
representational unit for depicting what a speaker has in mind. By
insisting that the relation between our ongoing momentary expe-
rience and meaning expressed is one of representing – he often
repeated “no expression without representation” – he was able to
show that in every language act the extralinguistic (our experi-
ence) conditions the linguistic (meaning), thereby bringing the
study of language down to the here and now of an individual act
unrolling in the present. Thus he confronted system and usage
within the reality of a person speaking in the present of conscious-
ness and in so doing, undertook one of the twentieth century’s
most intriguing adventures into the human mind.
In Guillaume’s day, people were becoming aware of “deep time”
(cf. Gould, 1–19) – or, geological time – which, not being perceiv-
able – because it stretches far beyond the limits of what is perceiv-
able through the earliest geological records – is only conceivable.
Guillaume’s insights led him into the realm of what might be
termed “deep mind” to explore the psychomechanisms of lan-
guage, the mental operations far below the surface of conscious-
ness that permit speakers to instantaneously produce ﬁtting words,
and subsequently sentences, from the language system constituting
their mother tongue. To guide him to these depths, to ﬁnd that
narrow passage between positivism and idealism, Guillaume had
only the scientiﬁc method as practiced by the great comparatists.
And so he begins his ﬁrst major work, his study on the article, as
follows (1919/1975,11): “The present work is an attempt to apply
the comparative method to the formal [grammatical] part of

10 Language in the Mind
languages.” This method called for careful observation of both
physical sign and meaning expressed, as well as a gift for reﬂection
that permitted him to move with ease from the general postulate
of system in language to particular uses, and from particular back
to general. His constant concern was to discern the mental pro-
cesses speakers undertake in order to translate, to “commute” as
he put it, some experience they have in mind, unsayable as raw
experience, into something said.
Rare were the linguists who could appreciate what Guillaume was
trying to do, particularly in view of the fact that, in this ﬁrst study,
he did not succeed. He did not manage to discern the potential
meanings of the articles and describe their system – it was to take
him another twenty years to do this – but this volume did prepare
the way for his ﬁrst success in depicting a preconscious system some
ten years later. In his 1929 volume Temps et verbe he describes three
systems of the French verb (aspect, mood, and tense) in terms of
mental processes. Meillet, one of the few who understood the sig-
niﬁcance of this achievement, once described the volume as “the
study most apt to make explicit what Saussure understood by la
langue,”
5
thus bringing out the real signiﬁcance of Saussure’s
dichotomy. On the other hand, Guillaume’s manner of conceiving
a grammatical system entailed something that most linguists would
consider quite non-Saussurian: it introduced the idea of process,
and therefore the dimension of time, into synchronic linguistics.
Since any process involves time, describing a system of tongue as
a mental process implies that it requires time, the micro-time
required for preconscious mental operations. While commonplace
today, to invoke preconscious psychomechanisms in Guillaume’s
day was viewed by many as outlandish, as a sort of metaphysical
speculation that had little to do with the reality of language, espe-
cially since it implies that whenever a verb is needed in a sentence
it must be constructed, or rather reconstructed, by the speaker.
Undeterred by this lack of comprehension, Guillaume pursued his
reﬂections and soon realized that what he had discerned for the
verb applies to all words: every time a word is needed for a sentence
it must be mentally reconstructed by the speaker. This is how
Guillaume’s whole linguistic career came to be focused on a single
problem, what he considered the central problem for linguistics:
how, from the possibilities of tongue, a speaker in the moment of
speech constructs words to be used in a sentence.

Introduction 11
One can perhaps understand why even Guillaume’s subsequent
work found such limited acceptance among his contemporaries.
Most linguists have no difﬁculty reducing their view of language in
diachrony stretching over many centuries, and even over the mil-
lennia of human existence, to a view of language in synchrony, in
the present, as Saussure proposes. But some effort is required to
focus on the present as it exists for the speaker because the present
reduces to the instant of consciousness wherein any speaker must
operate, to the “Cartesian instant” as Guillaume calls it.
6
Even more
effort is required to follow Guillaume when he takes us behind the
scenes, behind the words that emerge into consciousness, to dis-
cern the mental processes unrolling within the instant, bringing
words onto the stage of conscious awareness. Most disconcerting
of all, perhaps, is his viewing words as processes, the constructive
mental processes that bring them into existence. In fact, their
resultative, observable state, albeit real, is so ephemeral when we
speak as to be a mirage for some observers, a “linguistic ﬁgment.”
7
Disconcerting though it may be, viewing words (and of course
sentences) as merely passing over the stage of conscious awareness
is inevitable once we introduce the time dimension into the syn-
chrony of language, that is, into the process of someone thinking/
speaking and, as a consequence, of someone listening/understand-
ing. The durable result of a given act of speech is neither words
nor a sentence, but a message.
Having set out on this road to discern how speakers produce the
words they use – a road where, as he once wryly commented, he
was not bothered by the trafﬁc – Guillaume soon realized that a
word’s function is determined by the way it is constructed, by its
mental morphology or part of speech. Here too his views met with
limited acceptance since many linguists, concerned with a word’s
role in a sentence, were content to study syntax without any prior
examination of the words involved. In fact he was sometimes crit-
icized for neglecting the study of syntax, whereas in his own eyes
he was establishing the necessary basis – an understanding of the
grammatical makeup of words – that would permit us to explain
syntax and not merely “account for it” through a more or less
arbitrary description or set of rules.
Regarding the word, and particularly the verb and the article in
French, from the systemic point of view led Guillaume to consider
that traditional historical studies were incomplete. To trace the

12 Language in the Mind
development of, say, the future conjugation from Latin to contem-
porary French by examining each of the morphemes involved –
the history of their signs and their signiﬁcates – is insufﬁcient since
it neglects the changes in the system, i.e. the changing relation-
ships between the signiﬁcates, between the future tense and the
other tenses of the indicative. But again this view was not adopted
by many working in historical linguistics perhaps because they did
not consider the grammatical system, the verb in tongue, a mental
reality whose development could be traced over the centuries.
In the latter part of his professional life – see the ﬁrst two lectures
in the 1941–42 B series (2005,1–26) – Guillaume’s attention was
directed more and more to languages whose words are constructed
on bases quite different from the part-of-speech basis common to
languages in the Indo-European family. He came to realize that the
element common to all languages, the universal on which a lan-
guage typology can be based, is the word, or rather the vocable (a
more technical term he employed to avoid foisting our conception
of a word onto languages whose minimal sayable element of speech
is radically different). In his last years he laid the foundations, both
diachronic and synchronic, for a language typology, his Théorie des
aires glossogéniques, a theory comparing different language types on
the basis of the mental spaces – the “areas” – involved in their word-
forming systems. He planned to present and illustrate this theory
in a ﬁve-volume study but was able to complete an introductory
essay and the ﬁrst volume (Guillaume 2003,2007, respectively) of
this ambitious project before death intervened.
GUILLAUME TODAY
What does Guillaume have to contribute to linguistics today? Perhaps
the most striking contribution is his global view of language with
its two modes of existence for any speaker, as a systemic potential
and as actualized discourse, with the necessary mental processes
for passing from one to the other (see below, chapter 2). The
potential, a mental construct permitting the operations of repre-
senting and expressing anything arising in one’s experience, is a
permanent possession of the speaker, whereas discourse is the
result of intermittent acts of constructing words and sentences.
Guillaume was quite aware that this operative view of language held
implications both for areas of mental activity quite distinct from

Introduction 13
those involved in language and for the necessary physical substratum
of language. Intent as he was on establishing linguistics as a science
adequate to its object, however, he was careful not to step beyond
the bounds of language itself and so made little attempt to explore
obvious links with related disciplines such as psychology, neuro-
science, and philosophy.
Focusing on the word (vocable) is another basic contribution
because, although a language universal, the element of language
the ordinary speaker “feels that he knows best” as Bolinger (1963,
113) puts it, the word receives little attention from contemporary
scholars. Even those who accept it as part of the linguistic environ-
ment often consider that “we retrieve a word from the mental
lexicon,” as Croft and Cruse (109) put it, not perceiving the need
to construct it in the moment of speech. Guillaume’s view of it as
the fundamental unit of language – the unit of representation
and therefore to be reconstructed each time we want to use it –
provides a new way of looking at the word and its place in con-
structing a sentence (see chapter 3). Thus his speaker-oriented
approach focusing on the psychomechanisms involved in con-
structing words marks him off from other approaches and invites
research to bring to light the corresponding neuromechanisms.
Another general problem, that of polysemy, which confronts
anyone concerned with analyzing meaning, some consider a matter
of “schema-instance relations” (Taylor 2002,437), i.e. as involving
a general/particular relationship, others as “a matter of isolating
different parts of the total meaning potential of a word in different
circumstances” (Croft and Cruse, 109), i.e. as involving a whole/
part relationship. In chapter 4 it will be shown that Guillaume’s
manner of analyzing the senses expressed by a morpheme as actu-
alizations of a single underlying potential meaning provides a dif-
ferent explanation for polysemy. This potential/actual meaning
approach has proved valuable both in ESL (cf. Hirtle 1980) and
in teaching the deaf (cf. Sadek-Kahil 1996).
The view that every grammatical morpheme is part of an opera-
tional system brings out aspects of their meaning potential not
otherwise discernible, as will be seen in the analysis of the system
of number in chapter 5. Recognizing the micro-time required for
a system to operate, Guillaume was led to postulate a type of mental
operation underlying all systems, including that of the word. This
general postulate concerning the mental basis for human language

14 Language in the Mind
offers interesting prospects to be explored as a framework for
language acquisition and formation as well as a link with other
spheres of mental activity.
Of interest to those working in the diachronic perspective is
Guillaume’s method for analyzing grammatical systems, which is
essentially the same as the comparative method in historical stud-
ies. As is brought out in chapter 6, the main difference between
the two applications of the method is in the timespan separating
the observed fact from the reconstructed state. Having both a
common object and a common method of analyzing the data,
historical and descriptive linguistics can now be seen to form a
single science. This achievement constitutes an important develop-
ment for the history of science. Thanks to it Guillaume viewed
linguistics as a science on its own, distinct from neighbouring dis-
ciplines like psychology, but he was aware of the contribution it
can make to them, and particularly to anthropology through his
Theory of Glossogenetic Areas. This obviously applies to contem-
porary studies of human consciousness (e.g. Merlin Donald’s A
Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness).
Insofar as morphology is concerned, one extensive study states
in its conclusion that “one of the key unresolved questions in mor-
phology is ‘what is a word?’” (Spencer, 453). This is the question
Guillaume posed at the beginning of his study of morphology
because of his systemic approach. The realization that all words
have a morphology enabled Guillaume to make numerous original
observations concerning their grammatical makeup and to extend
his analysis to morphemes not provided with a distinct physical
sign. In order to illustrate how words are formed grammatically by
a part of speech in English, the genetic morphology of the substan-
tive and of the verb are described below (chapters 7 and 10, respec-
tively). His original view of the part of speech – a crucial question
for Guillaume as we have seen since it involves the deﬁnition of a
word in Indo-European languages – is perhaps his primary contri-
bution to contemporary linguistics, and particularly his manner of
conceiving a part of speech as a set of processes grammaticizing
the word’s lexical import rather than merely as a class of items
“stored in the speaker’s mental lexicon,” as Taylor (2002,74) puts it.
In syntax, the great variety of syntactic groups observed in discourse
has led a number of scholars to develop construction grammars (cf.
Croft and Cruse, 257–90). For Guillaume, such groupings are made

Introduction 15
possible by the meaning potentials, both lexical and grammatical,
provided by tongue and actualized in the words involved. Thus he
concentrated on describing the system of the part of speech
whereby a word receives its grammatical meaning, since this is what
permits it to establish a syntactic relation with another word or
phrase (see chapter 8). That is, since syntax is the consequence of
the makeup of the words involved – “every language has the syntax
of its morphology” as he used to put it (2004,352) – Guillaume’s
approach would add a new construct to those generally included in
construction grammars (cf. Taylor 2002,561–2), the one on which
the others depend, namely the word.
A word-based syntax inevitably leads to the question of establishing
a relation between one word and another, and so Guillaume comes
to consider syntax as essentially operative, as the set of processes
making one word or phrase “incident” to another. This manner of
conceiving syntax will be illustrated by describing the forming of
an auxiliary + verb compound (chapter 11), a noun phrase (chap-
ter13), and the relating of predicate to subject (chapter 14). From
an operational point of view, then, the study of syntax will focus
on the constructing of syntactic units rather than on the construc-
tions resulting from it. As in the diachronic perspective, in syn-
chrony it is the process leading up to the observed result that
permits us to explain it.
To see how far a word-based syntax can be pushed calls for a
more ﬁne-grained discussion of usage involving real examples
where the variation of the lexical import and its inﬂuence on the
grammatical import of the word can be shown to give rise to the
expressive effect of the sentence. Recognizing the difference
between the lexical and the grammatical meanings of words gave
Guillaume a means of distinguishing between what is particular,
depending on the speciﬁc words used, and what is general, arising
from the grammatical systems called on in a given construction.
This distinction, which has not been exploited in this way in other
approaches, provides a basis for explaining some of the ﬁner
nuances of meaning expressed in ordinary usage, as we shall see
in chapters 12–14.
Finally, Guillaume’s concern with the word-forming system of a
language focuses on what is general – every language has a system
for forming words – and on what is particular to each language –
no two languages, not even closely related ones, form words in

16 Language in the Mind
exactly the same way. Here it is not possible to describe types of
word that differ structurally from the word in English and compare
them within the framework of his general theory of typology, a
theory based on the idea that different mental “areas” or spaces
are required for forming words of different types, a notion of
mental spaces to be compared with that found in Fauconnier. We
will however be able to evoke brieﬂy (chapter 15) what is perhaps
the most general question raised by the title of the present study,
the relation between language and thought.
AN ALL-EMBRACING THEORY
Guillaume’s constant concern was thus to establish linguistics as a
science adequate to its object, capable of embracing in one view
the whole phenomenon of human language with all its variety in
geographical space, in historical and prehistorical time, and in
every speaker’s instant of consciousness. To do this he focused on
the word, attempting to discern how it is constructed by speakers
of different languages at different moments of historical time.
Since the purpose of this volume is to present the main tenets
of Guillaume’s theory of language through examples drawn from
contemporary English, it cannot do justice to this panoramic view
of language. It should therefore be supplemented by reading in
his published work (some twenty volumes so far), and particularly
in the one volume available in English.
8
No attempt is made to
include analyses of other languages based on Guillaume’s method
of analysis or the way some principle of Guillaume’s has been
applied in disciplines such as stylistics, language didactics and re-
education, translation, developmental psychology, and, of course,
the philosophy of language. The website of the Fonds Gustave
Guillaume (cf. note 2 above) provides a bibliography of these
applications, as well as the linguistic analyses published to date.
The general overview of a theory that, as sciences go, is still
relatively young inevitably results in a chiaroscuro where, it is
hoped, the many areas remaining to be explored will be seen as a
challenge for further research. Indeed, this also applies to those
areas already explored, since, as in any other science based on
observation, no particular explanation or theory should be consid-
ered to be proven beyond question. All that can be considered as
deﬁnitively acquired is the attitude proper to science, a postulate

Introduction 17
of system or order that has been called, hearkening back to Thales,
the “Ionian enchantment” (cf. Wilson, 3–7). This “prejudice of
order,” as Guillaume called it, sustained him throughout his ﬁfty
years of observing and reﬂecting on language, convinced, in spite
of the numerous problems encountered in usage, that there is
coherence at a deeper level. This is why he began the ﬁrst lecture
of his 1952–53 series with the following declaration:
Science is founded on the insight that the world of appearances tells of
hidden things, things which appearances reﬂect but do not resemble. One
such insight is that what seems to be disorder in language hides an under-
lying order – a wonderful order. The word is not mine – it comes from the
great Meillet, who wrote that “a language involves a system where every-
thing ﬁts together and has a wonderfully rigorous design.” This insight
has been the guide and continues to be the guide of the studies pursued
here. (1984,3)

2
Language and the Ability to Speak
1
The whole of science is nothing more than a reﬁnement of
everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein (1981,290)
LANGUE AND COMPETENCE:
SAUSSURE AND CHOMSKY
A few years ago a well-known linguist argued that we must take into
consideration “the obvious ability of people to speak” if we are to
reach “an understanding of language that is grounded in reality”
(Lamb), implying thereby that the individual’s capacity or poten-
tial for producing discourse is part of this reality. This way of view-
ing language, as a dyad, a twofold entity made up of observable
sentences and the non-observable ability or potential for produc-
ing them, is reminiscent of the langue vs parole dichotomy proposed
by Saussure in 1916 and, in a very different way, the competence
vs performance dichotomy proposed by Chomsky some ﬁfty years
later. Since neither of these proposals has widespread acceptance
as a basic parameter today, at least in the English-speaking world,
one may wonder what would justify making an apparently similar
proposal so recently. The question is of interest because it involves,
as we shall see, the efforts of linguists throughout the century to
ﬁnd a solid basis for linguistics as a science.
It is well known that Saussure had conceived a means of recon-
structing the system of vowels in Proto-Indo-European to explain
their historical development down to attested examples in the ear-
liest texts of the different Indo-European languages (1879/1987).
Imbued with this comparative method in historical linguistics –
observing attested examples, trying to understand the data by

The Ability to Speak 19
conceiving some prior state of affairs, explaining the data by
describingthe process whereby each of the attested examples
must have developed from the prior system
2
– Saussure attempted
to adopt the same scientiﬁc approach for language in synchrony
by eliminating the historical dimension, the temporal parameter.
To explain observable parole, he proposed langue as the necessary
state of language structure, the system governing the usage of indi-
vidual speakers. Saussure’s notion of langue has been interpreted
in different ways, one of which, suggested by Saussure himself
(1916/1955,25,31,38, etc.), being that it is the language of the
community without the particularities of individual usage, a sort of
norm. As such, language-as-langue came to be considered an
abstraction, a purely theoretical construct that has no observable
role to play in actual speaking because the community does not
speak, only individuals. In fact, Saussure did not attempt to justify
its existence by working out, as he had done for the theoretical
construct in his historical studies, either the system of langue or the
processes whereby the facts of parole could be shown to be the con-
sequences of that system. It is therefore not surprising that his view
oflangue was not widely accepted as part of the reality of language.
In Guillaume’s day, few linguists of the English-speaking world,
inﬂuenced by positivism, gave such abstractions serious consider-
ation as a basis for language analysis. It was not until Chomsky pro-
posed his competence/performance dichotomy that the idea
resurfaced, but in a different form: language-as-competence is the
prerogative of the ideal speaker. Thus competence, not to be found
in any real speaker with his or her limitations and subject to all the
accidents involved in producing discourse, is also an idealization.
Although it may be a useful conception for some purposes, it is not
linked, through the actual operations undertaken by an individual
speaker, to perceivable discourse. That is, understood in this way,
competence, like langue, has no existence outside the linguist’s
imagination and so can provide no basis for describing a real
speaker’s language ability, or potential (to use a more general
term). Small wonder, then, if the very notion of language-as-a-
potential is treated with suspicion, and even outright derision, when
such renowned linguists fail to provide a satisfactory account of it.
It remains, however, that two such failures are not sufﬁcient
grounds for considering language-as-a-potential to be merely an

20 Language in the Mind
explanatory expedient with no real existence, something like the
ether of nineteenth-century physics. After all, in our everyday
thinking we assume that the notion of a potential is a necessary
component of other situations: the moment we see someone riding
a bicycle or playing the piano we know that they have acquired the
ability to do so and that this ability exists whether that person is
actually performing or not. Similarly, when we hear someone
speaking, we have no choice but to assume that they have acquired
the ability or potential to speak that particular language.
3
In other
words, it is “obvious” for Guillaume that language-as-a-potential, far
from being just a ﬁgment of the linguist’s imagination, really does
exist in speakers even though they are quite unaware of it. Equally
obvious, this potential exists whether one is actually involved in
speaking or not, it being, in fact, a permanent acquisition of any
person, barring accidents.
Not only does our ordinary experience suggest this, but research
on the brain is providing external evidence that some such poten-
tial is a cognitive reality. And so, taking cognitive in the sense of
neurological, it has been suggested that the ability to speak resides
in the brain, in the necessary physical support of language. Guillaume
never envisaged any such hypothesis, probably because it would
entail deriving from a physical potential the actual mental content,
or meaning, we get from a sentence. While recognizing that lan-
guage (or any other mental construct for that matter) cannot exist
without a neurological support, he considered this support to be
outside language and so beyond the linguist’s ﬁeld of competence.
Hence he postulated that language-as-a-potential is something non-
physical, a strictly mental part of language.
Although the ability to speak is a cognitive reality, in the psychical
not the physical sense of the term, it cannot emerge into conscious
awareness. That is to say, if everyday thinking is any indication,
language-as-a-potential is a permanent, albeit hidden, feature of
the linguistic landscape whose existence can be ignored in linguis-
tics only if we turn our backs on part of reality. It would seem,
therefore, that the linguist’s efforts can best be employed in
attempting to reconstruct this part of reality by theoretical means,
and not in ignoring it, or placing it outside language in the neuro-
logical substratum, or dismissing it to the limbo of a non-speaking
community or a nonexistent, ideal speaker.

The Ability to Speak 21
LANGUAGE-AS-A-POTENTIAL: GUILLAUME
The real problem for linguistics, then, is not whether this potential
exists in the preconscious mind but rather how to come to grips
with it – how to analyze it, how to describe it, how to relate it back
to observable data – and this problem is inescapable for anyone
who wants to understand and explain human language. As in other
sciences based on the data of observation, it is a matter of ﬁnding
the way to approach an area of reality whose existence appears to
us necessary even though we cannot know it through observing it
directly but only through observing its results. The approach one
adopts will be determined in large part by the way one ﬁrst con-
ceives of this ability, by the initial vague notion one forms of what
a language in its most elemental form is. This often uncritical
assumption we make concerning the nature of language is impor-
tant because from the outset it conditions what we look for in the
data. Conceiving of it as either the system of an ideal speaker or
as a sort of norm for a community of speakers has proved inade-
quate. The problem for linguistics as a science, which like any
other science attempts to embrace the whole of its object, is this:
how can our language potential be conceived in terms of an ability
acquired and exercised individually by speakers constituting a
language community?
Initially we can attribute three characteristics to language-as-a-
potential: it is organized, dynamic, and mental. Since Saussure it
has been commonplace to consider language as somehow orga-
nized in a system, if only because we can usually use our mother
tongue so readily and with such unerring ease even in novel situ-
ations. Just as Saussure attributed the coherent set of relationships
to the vowels in his PIE reconstruction and not to the set of actual
results in the various attested languages, we are led to seek the
system in the potential part of language. This relieves the linguist
of the impossible task of trying to prove at all costs that actual usage
is systematic in itself, that syntax constitutes an independent sys-
tem. Since an ability is for producing results, this systematic poten-
tial must also be dynamic by nature. That is, a system providing the
potential for carrying out certain productive processes must be
organized in such a way as to make these processes or operations
possible. And ﬁnally, since these operations are in large part

22 Language in the Mind
cognitive, consisting of thought processes, the ability permitting
them must be in the mind. All this leads Guillaume to conceive
language-as-a-potential to be a coherent construct in the mind per-
mitting the repeated carrying out of certain operations, i.e. to be
a mental mechanism, or rather a set of psychomechanisms.
Compared with the Saussurian and Chomskyian approaches, this
involves a very different way of regarding our ability to speak since
it implies that each of us has a set of dynamic systems enabling us
to realize the mental and physical processes required to construct
and utter the words and sentences we need in order to talk about
whatever we have in mind and to understand the discourse of oth-
ers. Viewing a person’s language potential as a set of mental systems
in this way involves both an operational conception far removed
from Saussure’s idea of la langue as a set of static oppositions and
a real-speaker oriented conception poles apart from the compe-
tence of an ideal speaker. It is closer to an approach that considers
“A dynamic view of conceptualization … essential to a principled
understanding of grammar” (Langacker 1997,249) because here
the ordinary speaker’s mental activity is considered crucial.
Essentially, Guillaume views our ability to speak as the set of
linguistic conditions in the mind necessary to produce whatever we
say, a view he developed from 1919 on. This organized set of
psychomechanisms constituting the language potential of any
speaker, as we have seen, he calls tongue (la langue) to indicate
that it is just as real as discourse, the actual speech and texts a
speaker produces. Thus for Guillaume our mother tongue is an
“obvious ability,” an acquired capacity of the mind that we activate
whenever we want to talk about something.
USING THE ABILITY
The upshot of all this is that in order to grasp the reality of language
– and this includes both what can be seen and what cannot be seen
– we must always keep in mind its two modes of existence, the
potential and the actual, ability and speech (or text). But this is not
all. To grasp its total reality we must also keep in mind the language
processes whereby the potential is actualized to produce a particu-
lar unit of discourse. This brings us to the main problemin obtain-
ing as complete and realistic a view of language as possible:what are
the successive phases involved in a person undertaking an act of

The Ability to Speak 23
language and producing a certain discourse? Quite obviously, when
we speak we do not put all our mother tongue into a sentence but
rather call on certain of its resources to say what we have in mind.
That is to say, certain of the resources made available by tongue
must be activated in order to produce the discourse appropriate to
whatever particular situation the speaker has in mind to talk about
at that moment. It is this calling on certain formative elements,
both lexical and grammatical, as well as their signs, to form words
that represent and express what we want to say that constitutes the
actualizing processes involved in any act of language. Thus to use
a verb involves calling to mind the particular lexical element
required (for example, in the present sentence the notion ‘involve’)
with the appropriate tense, mood, person, etc. made possible by
the system of the verb in English. (See my 2007 study on the verb
for a detailed description of how a verb is formed.) And since the
grammatical components – morphemes as Guillaume calls them
4
– are organized in systems, and these systems integrated into the
more general systems called parts of speech, we are led to view the
grammatical side of tongue as “a system of systems” in Guillaume’s
terms,
5
as an organized set of linguistic systems each permitting
certain mental operations for producing words.
To help bring out the implications of this, it is worthwhile citing
a passage distinguishing cognitive grammar from generative gram-
mar: “As conceived in the present framework, the grammar of a
language is simply an inventory of linguistic units. A grammar is
not a “generative” description, providing a formal enumeration of
all and only the well-formed sentences of a language. Nor do I
employ the process metaphor and speak of the grammar as a
device that carries out a series of operations and gives well-formed
sentences as its output” (Langacker 1987b,63). For Guillaume, on
the other hand, a grammatical system is the dynamic potential for
carrying out a series of operations to produce words in order to
construct a sentence expressing one’s momentary experience (and
not to conform to what a linguist might consider “well-formed”).
His grammar is, however, not subject to the criticisms levelled
against generative grammar (cf. Langacker 1987b,64f) since it is
generative in the common, non-mathematical sense and, as we
shall see in the next chapter, it is ﬁrst and foremost a means of
producing words, and only as a consequence a means of construct-
ing a sentence. A word is not a ready-made item in an inventory

24 Language in the Mind
but rather a made-to-order product, reconstructed on each occasion
for use in the sentence under construction. In this respect,
Guillaume’s position is quite different from that of both generative
grammar and cognitive grammar.
Thus, to understand the Psychomechanics of Language, as
Guillaume’s theory is generally designated, it is essential to shift
one’s perspective from the habit of thinking about language merely
as an end-product, a text or speech, to be described, or merely as
a set of items to be used in a sentence. It would be more realistic
to take into account the means of production, that is, to consider
language as a dichotomy opposing ability and sentences actually
said. But even this is insufﬁcient. To grasp the whole reality of lan-
guage it is necessary to view it as a triad, a threefold entity wherein
the operational component, language-as-operations, has its place
between language-as-a-potential and language-as-actualized. This
can be summarized in the following manner:
But even this formula, which suggests that one component is
simply added to another to make up the whole, is inadequate
because the third component is the outcome of the second, which
is itself permitted by the ﬁrst. We can bring out these condition/
consequence relationships more clearly with a more speciﬁc termi-
nology and by depicting the whole of language as essentially dynamic
in the following way:
The effect of introducing the dynamic or operative element into
our consideration of language is to bring out the condition/con-
sequence relationship between potential and actual by making
explicit the temporal dimension involved in any operation. This
gives a view of language in synchrony quite different from that
proposed by Saussure. As a result of ignoring the temporal dimen-
sion, he came to consider language as something immobile, static,
reduced to a thing, an object. In reality language is anything but
static: it is dynamic from beginning to end. This operativity is obvious
in the actual pronouncing of the sounds, but it includes far more
than this. There are the operations involved in the syntax, all the
language =
actualizing
operations
actual outputlanguage ability + +
language =
representing
and expressing a
given experience
sentence
produced
systemic potential

The Ability to Speak 25
preconscious mental operations required to relate the meanings
imported by different words to give rise to the meaning of the
sentence. And prior to this syntactic operativity there are all the
representational operations involved in actualizing the meaning
potential of the lexeme and of each of the morphemes to produce
the particular meaning and syntactic potential of a word permitting
it to play the role required of it in the sentence being constructed.
Both language-as-a-potential (tongue) and language-as-actual (dis-
course) are realities, but neither should be considered as an object
in itself: for the linguist, the former is a system of potential oper-
ations and the latter the result of a series of operations, a sentence
(or a number of sentences).
6
Thus what the above equation
expresses could be formulated differently:
Although the time involved in representing and expressing one’s
experience is extremely short, keeping this temporal dimension in
mind enables linguists to focus on the reality of language. Here
again a basic tenet of Guillaume’s is paralleled in contemporary
cognitive work: “Conceptual structure emerges and develops through
processing time; it resides in processing activity whose temporal dimen-
sion is crucial to its characterization” (Langacker 1997,249;
emphasis in the original). As we shall see in the next chapter, it is
the processing time, the time involved in any activity or operation
– what Guillaume calls “operative time” – that provides him with
the parameter for analyzing language activity. Since he often speaks
of subconscious mental “operations” or “processes,” it is well to
point out at the outset that he uses these terms in their common
acceptation (i.e. as what is necessarily implied when linguists speak
of language as “dynamic”), on the understanding that the process-
ing time involved, the microtime of any mental operation, is so
short it escapes perception.
It is important to understand why an awareness of the temporal
dimension keeps one in touch with the reality of language. A sen-
tence cannot be seen as an object in itself but only as the ﬁnal
phase of an act of speech, the outcome of a speaker putting a
momentary complex of experiential impressions into language. As
speakers we always “language” some content of consciousness (i.e.
put some experience into language), and, in fact, we cannot talk
about anything but what we have in mind. This languaging, this
language =
result of actualized
operations
actualizable
operations
actualizing
operations

26 Language in the Mind
translating of some extralinguistic experience into the meaning-
units provided by the words of one’s language, is part of the causal
chain – a part often overlooked by linguists – giving rise to any
coherent discourse. Since speaking necessarily involves talking
about something one has in mind, nonsense strings – sets of words
that have no correlate in the experiential awareness of the person
stringing the words together – should not be confused with sen-
tences, which are the outcome of real language processes actuated
by speakers in order to represent and express some content of
experience they want to talk about.
It will perhaps bring out this fundamental point more adequately
if we consider for a moment what is, for many linguists, the most
remarkable characteristic of language: the capacity it gives us to
represent and express whatever comes into our minds. This extraor-
dinary ability – to give a linguistic form to something outside lan-
guage by translating a passing experience into word meanings and
saying it – is far more than a mere object or thing. My mother
tongue is constantly meeting different requirements, adapting to
new experiences, permitting me to represent and express novel mes-
sages – and, of course, to understand novel messages (like Hairsa-
tionson a shopfront, or scentsations in an ad). No system of post-factum
rules, no commonly accepted norm for speaking, no set of sentences
or inventory of linguistic units however numerous – none of these
static ways of viewing language-as-a-potential could possibly account
for the give and take of actual usage. This is the reality that a descrip-
tion of language in synchrony must deal with. Every time we want
to use a morpheme we must actualize it again; every time we use a
lexeme to represent and express something, we must form it again
as a word along the lines provided in the system in tongue. What is
called for, as Guillaume (cf. 1984,79–99) so often stated, is to aban-
don the idealized, non-temporal view of synchrony left us by
Saussure and reintroduce the parameter of time as the basis of a
method of analysis, as the measure of the real operations that com-
mute a speaker’s extralinguistic experience into something said.
THE CHALLENGE:
THINKING OF LANGUAGE AS A PROCESS
If this way of envisaging language does bring us closer to reality,
one may well wonder why it is not adopted by all linguists. One
reason is that it goes against the grain of a certain type of empiricism

The Ability to Speak 27
that would reduce linguistics to what can be induced from measur-
able data, as O’Kelly (57–61) makes abundantly clear. The experi-
ence of other sciences suggests another reason: the very fact of
introducing the dimension of time into an area of reality hitherto
seen as static is sometimes accepted with difﬁculty.
7
The heritage left by Saussure of viewing language in synchrony
as static combined with the lack of any method for analyzing the
“psychological reality” of language operations helps to explain this
difﬁculty in linguistics. But the reasons appear to go even deeper.
For one thing, we acquire our mother tongue so naturally that we
simply take it for granted and are normally quite unaware of the
language potential we possess. Moreover, because almost all of the
languaging processes are preconscious and so escape any direct
observation, we see only their results, the sentences making up
discourse, especially as written. Thus it is not surprising that, in the
naïve view of the ordinary speaker, language is something static,
like an object. And so when we learn the word language as young-
sters its concept is formed with this limited scope, and this sufﬁces
for the needs of the vast majority of speakers. For scholars who
focus on the study of language as such, however, adopting this
common term as part of their learned vocabulary should lead to
an examination of its popular sense so that they can be fully aware
of the concept of language they are adopting in using it. Linguists
can and should extend its meaning to cover all the reality of the
object of their study, and this requires a conscious effort.
This is what Saussure attempted to do, with only partial success,
as we have seen, because he failed to bring in the operative com-
ponent. Although some linguists have not attempted to do so, if
one can judge by those who characterize language as “a set of sen-
tences,” the fact that many do characterize language as “dynamic”
shows that this static view is being superseded, even if not all lin-
guists use this term in the same sense, as we shall see below when
examining the type of process or operation it implies for Guillaume.
In short, if we are prepared to do violence to our ordinary-speaker,
uncritical assumption as to the nature of language by keeping
clearly in mind a language-as-a-potential component and introduc-
ing a language-as-operations component in this way, we can begin
to grasp the reality of language as a whole.
Among the other theoretical approaches that view language as
dynamic, many focus on syntax because here the operational is
most clearly manifested in a language like English. Guillaume goes

28 Language in the Mind
far beyond this, as we shall see. He applied the notion of operativity
not only to the constructing of the sentence but to the constructing
of the word, focusing on the operational in morphology.
8
He even
proposed that the meaning of a morpheme or grammatical word
involves a movement or process. This introducing of a dynamic
view throughout the meaning side of language will be shown
repeatedly below. It all resulted in a theory centred around the
word, but before going on to that discussion a brief comment on
terminology will be useful.
Experience shows that, even after accepting the point of view that
language is inherently operational, one is constantly confronted
with the danger of lapsing back into static ways of thinking and
speaking about it, simply because the ordinary-speaker “static”
sense of the word language is constantly with us.
9
This is why the
terminology adopted to designate the three components, or better,
phases of language is so important. The term discourse, quite widely
used for both speech and text, is appropriate to designate language-
as-actualized. There is no term in common usage to designate the
operational phase of representing one’s experience of the moment
and expressing the representation of it through speaking or writ-
ing. The term wordage, in the sense of “the use of words,” is far too
rare. Less recondite, the term languaging in the sense of “putting
one’s experience into language” is the best found so far to desig-
nate language-as-operations. Most important and most difﬁcult in
this “struggle for words,” as Einstein (1981,327) in a similar situ-
ation put it, is to ﬁnd a term for language-as-a-potential. It is hardly
satisfactory to use the French term langue, which at best in English
evokes the static view of Saussure. To use the term language itself,
as in Gardiner (passim), is misleading because, besides using the
name of the whole for one of the components, it is of no help in
calling to mind the new view proposed by Guillaume. Even expres-
sions like language as system or potential language, which point to the
hidden part of language, would simply tend to make one think of
resultative language, discourse, from another point of view. The
advantage of tongue, the term adopted here, is that it designates
language-as-a-potential as existing in its own right distinct from lan-
guage-as-actualized, and so obliges us to enlarge our concept of
language beyond the common-usage, resultative sense. Although
some people have trouble accepting tongue in the sense of “the
power of communication or expression through speech” (Webster’s,

The Ability to Speak 29
s.v.) as in expressions like the mother tongue and tongues of men and
of angels, it is the most appropriate substantive available in English.
Any initial hesitation in using it in this sense is perhaps a reﬂection
of the fact that the reality it denotes is something hitherto unfamiliar
and so easily overlooked.
The following diagram will serve to suggest this view of language
as a three-phase act carried out every time someone speaks
10
:
By representing the reality of the language phenomenon in this
way, we see these successive phases as links in a chain of causality.
11
This provides synchronic linguistics with a solid basis for expla-
nation, one shared with the other sciences based on observation
because, as Aristotle remarked, “Here, as elsewhere, we shall under-
stand things best if we consider them as they emerge from their
origins” (cited in Waldron 1985, vi). In any case, since this condi-
tion/consequence approach works well in other sciences, and in
comparative grammar, it should be exploited to the full elsewhere
in the science of language as a means of reconciling the legitimate
claims of both structuralism and psychologism in linguistics
12
with-
out sacriﬁcing either the reality of the individual act of language
or the reality of the hidden system. In short, it appears that the best
way of reaching “an understanding of language that is grounded
in reality” is to consider it “a commutation … that translates one’s
momentary thought into speech” (cf. Guillaume 1995,305).
tongue languaging discourse

3
Words, Words, Words
Even the most detailed works of grammar have lost sight of the fact
that the word has its architecture, that it is a system. This is nevertheless
an important grammatical fact, the most important of all, and yet it is
passed over in silence.
Guillaume (1990,60)
SENTENCES AS RESULTS
The mere observation of people speaking with such ease of whatever
they happen to have in mind is a cause for wonder, and so for
scientiﬁc investigation. It has led us to our basic postulate that for
each speaker language is a potential (tongue) permitting innumer-
able actualizations (discourse) and that, as a potential, language is
somehow systematic. This entails enlarging our initial conception
of what a language is to include not only obvious, observable,
actualized language but also what this necessarily implies, the non-
observable system and the partly observable languaging processes
1
:
Adopting as our starting point this view of language as a three-
fold reality appears inescapable because it arises from that habit of
our everyday thinking whereby we attribute to anyone carrying out
an activity the ability to do so. Furthermore, this would seem to be
a sound basis for analyzing language in order to understand and
explain it since, it appears, science is a reﬁnement of common
habits of thought, such as seeking causes. We therefore adopt this
postulate and then try to discern just what is involved in tongue
and in the languaging processes that result in discourse.
It is also part of our everyday thinking to consider language in
terms of words and sentences, both words and sentences being
observable features in the discourse of all languages.
2
The fact that
tongue languaging discourse

Words, Words, Words 31
any extended speech or text can be divided into sentences shows
why the sentence is commonly considered the unit of discourse: a
sentence can be integrated as a component into a bigger whole.
Furthermore, we sometimes observe that a sentence is interrupted,
but then we get the feeling of something missing. The very fact of
getting an impression of incompletion in such cases indicates that
for the ordinary speaker the sentence is somehow recognized as a
form constituting a whole, a unit. This is reﬂected in the traditional
description of the sentence as “the expression of a complete
thought,” a tradition stemming from the classical grammarian
Dionysius Thrax, for whom “A sentence is a combination of words
displaying a self-sufﬁcient meaning.”
3
Such descriptions evoke in a
superﬁcial way what a sentence does but do not go very far in
telling us what a sentence is. That is to say, the sentence certainly
does have the function of saying something about what the speaker
has in mind and expressing it as a whole in some way, but this
observation merely poses the problem for the linguist: how to
reach a knowledge of the way a sentence is put together, of its
makeup permitting it to function in this manner. Superﬁcial
though it may be, this traditional description is nevertheless invalu-
able as a starting point in common experience because it leads us
to ask what preconditions must be met for a string of words, or in
some cases a single word, to be able to express a complete thought
and so to be a sentence.
This working back from an observed result in an attempt to get
an understanding of how something is put together is a common
procedure both in everyday thinking – one is reminded of the
natural curiosity of a youngster on observing the functioning of a
watch – and in science, as shown by the well-known closed watch
example given by Einstein and Enfeld (31) to illustrate the work
of the scientist. As Guillaume remarks (1992,97): “the linguist
must learn to turn observed results back into genetic processes, in
other words, reconstitute the mental process leading up to the
result, the process whose conclusion is the observed result.”
WHICH COMES FIRST:
THE SENTENCE OR THE WORD?
The ﬁrst step in examining any complex entity like a sentence is
to analyze it, to break it down into its component parts, since the
way anything functions is conditioned by its makeup. Applied to

32 Language in the Mind
sentences, this procedure results in what is evident for the ordinary
speaker: the elements of the sentence are words. Commonplace
experience tells us that no sentence can exist without words, or at
least a word, and that all sentences can be broken down into words.
At the risk of belabouring the obvious, I insist on this point because
some linguists focusing on how the sentence is constructed have
tended to neglect it and as a consequence have failed to see the
importance of the word in every analysis of language.
Thus we are led to the view that, just as the sentence is the
building block, the unit, of discourse, the word is the unit of the
sentence because a word is a whole that can be integrated into a
sentence. But there is a difference: a word has a particular gram-
matical function when used in a given sentence and this raises the
problem of understanding how a word can fulﬁll this role. Again
we must adopt the procedure of analyzing the word, of breaking
it down into its component parts to see how it is put together. Only
when we get a view of the formative elements of different words
can we hope to explain how words function and, as a consequence,
explain how a sentence fulﬁlls its function. In short, as a necessity
of analysis we must obtain some understanding of the nature of
words in order to understand the nature of a sentence. A theory
of the word is a prior condition for a theory of the sentence
because morphology (in the sense of the grammatical components
of a word’s meaning) conditions syntax.
The many attempts to analyze the sentence without a prior analysis
of the word have resulted in syntactic analyses, descriptions of
the relations between words often expressed in the form of rules,
but they provide no explanation for the observed relationships. For
example, one can formulate rules to describe usage in cases like
He forced me to do it and He made me do it, but to understand why forced
takesto with the following inﬁnitive, whereas made does not, requires
an analysis of the words involved – the lexical meanings of force and
make, the meaning of to and the grammatical meaning of the inﬁn-
itive (cf. Dufﬂey 1992a) – because a relationship is largely deter-
mined by the makeup of the entities involved. “It follows from this
that, with a good method, in a sound linguistics, any study of
the constructional mechanism of the sentence will be subordinated
to a prior consideration of the structure of the word” (Guillaume
1971,30).
This is why Guillaume’s ﬁfty years of reﬂection on language were
devoted largely to working out a general theory of the word, and

Words, Words, Words 33
particularly of the different types of word found in languages that
have established parts of speech as subsystems within the general
system of the word. This focus on the word is, as we have seen,
distinctive of his approach, which has sometimes been criticized
for neglecting the study of the sentence by those who do not see
that morphology conditions syntax. His word-based grammar fol-
lows from the potential/actual viewpoint outlined in the preceding
chapter since the potential of tongue consists essentially in the
system for constructing words. And this system, Guillaume found,
is by no means the same for all languages. On the contrary, he saw
that language types are to be distinguished on the basis of the
overall system for constructing words, the most general system of
any language. In any psychomechanical analysis, therefore, we ﬁrst
focus attention on the words involved. Only in this way can one
come to understand how they work in the sentence and so get to
the point where the syntactic processes involved in constituting the
sentence can be described.
The ordinary speaker is at least minimally aware of both words
and sentences as forms. Since speaking as we know it would not be
possible without them, it is part of the linguist’s task to understand
and explain them. Ultimately, ﬁnding a satisfactory answer to these
two fundamental questions – what is a word? what is a sentence? –
will carry us a long way toward understanding what language is.
THE FUNDAMENTAL UNITS OF LANGUAGE
Turning to the word, then, we might point out that our grammatical
tradition provides no description of the word as it does in the case
of the sentence. A reason for this may be that native speakers of
English make practically no mistakes in forming words, only one
word in a million according to one study.
4
The fact that word
fragments are simply not part of the ordinary Anglophone’s expe-
rience of language is perhaps the reason why so little reﬂection on
the word as a unit, on what it takes to have a complete word, has
arisen. Words always surface into consciousness well formed, so as
ordinary speakers, and even as linguists, we tend to take them for
granted. This is not, of course, to deny the importance of many
contributions in the ﬁelds of lexical semantics, grammatical seman-
tics, or word composition. The point is rather that there has been
comparatively little concern with the system of the word, the word
recognized as a unit by the ordinary speaker. One acute observer

34 Language in the Mind
of language puts the question this way: “Why is it that the element
of language which the naïve speaker feels that he knows best is the
one about which linguists say the least?” (Bolinger 1963,113).
Clearly the word poses a problem for linguists, or should pose
one at any rate. If a sentence is a combination of words expressing
a self-sufﬁcient meaning, a complete thought (whatever that may
be), what is a word and what does it do? In his Word Grammar,
Hudson (4) alludes to the problems involved in deﬁning the word
in terms of recognizing its boundaries for the needs of linguistic
analysis. But the question goes beyond delimiting it on the level of
the sign to the very nature of the word as a mental unit, as Saussure
(1916/1955,154; my translation) had suggested: “the word, in
spite of the difﬁculty one has deﬁning it, is a unit which imposes
itself on the mind, something central in the mechanism of tongue.”
And much more recently, George Miller (5) raised basically the
same question from the point of view of the word’s function: “Why
are all languages wordy? Why are words a universal design feature
of languages?” Like sentences, words are found in all languages
and so their role must also be quite general. Even more: words are
found when there is no sentence, only sentence fragments, since
there can be no expressing by means of language, no act of speak-
ing or writing in any language without words. (Hence the irony
bordering on insolence in Hamlet’s response to Polonius, cited as
the title of this chapter.) Words are as general as language itself
and are, in fact, “the fundamental units of language” (Miller, 261),
not in the sense of the smallest elements arrived at by linguistic
analysis but in the sense Sapir (33), in the light of his experience
with young speakers of Nootka, describes the word to be “a psycho-
logical reality,” “the existent unit of living speech.”
Guillaume early recognized the primacy of the word, perhaps as
a result of reading Saussure, but he did not leave the problem
there. In fact his constant concern over the next forty or so years
was to understand what is built into a word making it a recogniz-
able unit and permitting it to fulﬁll its particular role in the sen-
tence. The originality of his whole approach to language is based
on his answer to this question: what is a word? First of all, therefore,
we will attempt to bring out in a general way his view of the makeup
and the functions of the word.
Among those who have attempted to deﬁne the word, it has long
been recognized that a word has a physical existence making it a
sayable unit. This has been expressed in various ways: “the smallest

Words, Words, Words 35
speech-unit,” “a minimum free form” (both cited in Ullmann, 51),
“a combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound … a vocable”
(OED), etc. That is, from the point of view of their physical side,
the words of a language are the smallest units that can be pro-
nounced in ordinary speech. Although there are borderline cases
where we may hesitate – cases requiring further study – the pro-
nounceable character of words helps us distinguish a word from a
sufﬁx or preﬁx or root and its minimalist character distinguishes
it from a phrase or sentence, except in cases of one-word phrases
or sentences. The physical side of a word is fully actualized in
ordinary speech but is only minimally actualized in that inner dia-
logue that accompanies much of our thinking, a situation that is
reﬂected in the common remark: “There was so much noise I
couldn’t hear myself think.” Even in the case of inner dialogue,
however, the physical side fulﬁlls its function of making the word
perceivable, though in this case it is only made mentally perceiv-
able and just to the speaker. The very fact that we can distinguish
these two degrees of actualization indicates that the physical side
of the word exists for the speaker not just as a set of sounds but
also as a potential, as a set of phonemes drawn from the phono-
logical system of the language. From this point of view, then, the
word as a potential can be described as a sayable element of
discourse, or, most succinctly, a vocable.
It is also commonly accepted that a word is not just a set of sounds
but has a mental side as well. To bring out this binary nature of a
word, it has been described in the OED as “an ultimate minimal
element of speech having a meaning as such,” and by Gray (cited
in Ullmann, 51) as “the smallest thought-unit vocally expressible.”
That is, the sounds constitute a sign that calls to mind a meaning;
hence the word is a physico-mental unit. When we hear a word
spoken, it is the physical part, the sign, we hear, and this sign, being
permanently linked to a certain meaning, calls its meaning to mind
so that we immediately become aware of the notion or idea the
speaker is expressing. Likewise, when as speakers we have some
meaning to express, we actualize the sign associated with it. At the
very heart of the word’s makeup, then, we ﬁnd the well-known sign-
meaning liaison, which Guillaume (1989,13f) describes as follows:
We have here a symphysis, a remarkable mental welding thanks to which
a fragment of speech automatically calls to itself a fragment of thought,
and conversely the fragment of thought calls up the fragment of speech.

36 Language in the Mind
The liaison is reversible, and this reversibility makes it possible for discourse
to be understood by the person we speak to. This second person, to whom
we speak, hears the fragments of speech and simultaneously evokes the
corresponding parts of what is thinkable in tongue. The liaison is a reality
in tongue.
5
This is a two-way relationship that turns out to be more complex
than it may appear at ﬁrst sight.
One complication arises from the fact that this relationship is
not symmetrical. For the listener the sign is a means of calling to
mind its meaning; however the meaning, once evoked, makes the
listener think not of its sign but rather of what the speaker has in
mind, what the speaker is talking about, the message. The sign is
at the service of the word’s meaning, but not vice versa since we
use a word for the meaning it can express and not for the way it
sounds (unless we happen to be a poet). That is to say, the use of
a word can be explained in terms of the meaning it expresses. In
this respect, there appears to be much in common between psy-
chomechanics and cognitive grammar: “The most fundamental
issue in linguistic theory is the nature of meaning and how to deal
with it” (Langacker 1987b,5). Meaning is primordial in the word
because the notion or idea a word expresses is linked to the mes-
sage, to what the speaker intends to communicate. It is this link
between the speaker’s intended message and the meaning of a
word that justiﬁes the use of a given word in a given act of lan-
guage, a fact that throws light on another of the word’s functions.
To make this clear and to bring out an important principle of
psychomechanics, we must now examine more fully this relation-
ship between word meaning and what the speaker has in mind to
talk about.
FROM MESSAGE TO MEANING
Few of us have ever stopped to reﬂect on how many different things
we can talk about. We probably feel that the range of possible
subjects of discourse available to us is quite unlimited because we
can talk about anything that comes into our mind. As Linda Waugh
(30) points out, citing Jakobson: “It is not the world outside which
we talk about but an inner world, the ‘world of human experience, the
world as it is perceived within us, the universe of discourse.’” And

Words, Words, Words 37
indeed, that seems to be the only limit: something must occur to
us, must come into our consciousness, before we can talk about
it. Conversely, in order to speak we must have something in mind to
talk about. This intended message may be a passing thought or
feeling, an outcome of reasoning, something arising from imme-
diate perception or memory or imagination, from what someone
has just said or from some other source, or any combination of
these – in brief, we can talk about anything provided we are con-
scious of it, provided it is part of our experiential awareness. This
particular momentary experience is not part of our language and
so it exists whether we talk about it or not, but unless we represent
it linguistically or in some other way, this experience remains
strictly private, incommunicable, unsayable.
6
This is why it is impor-
tant to have some idea of what is involved in the process of repre-
senting something linguistically, of making the unsayable sayable.
In order to talk about something, in order to make it sayable,
therefore, we must call on the resources of our language, which
have been instituted precisely in order to depict the momentary
content of our stream of consciousness in such a way that we can
grasp it more readily ourselves and make it available to others. That
is, our language matches the complex of impressions making up
our message with the lexical notions of the most appropriate words
available, meanings that are shared by other speakers of the lan-
guage. In short, as speakers we represent our extralinguistic expe-
rience thanks to word meanings and we express the resulting linguistic
representations thanks to signs. Tongue provides the resources
for this: the meanings representing experience, the means for
forming them into grammatical units (words) and the accompany-
ing signs to make the units sayable. The outcome of actually saying
them in sentence units is discourse.
This then is the primary function of words: representing the
intended message, translating one’s unsayable experience of the
moment into linguistically sayable units of meaning. Without some-
one representing their own experience in this way, no actual lan-
guage can exist. This fact explains why words are “a universal design
feature” not only of all languages (i.e. as potentials, as instruments
ready for representing) but also, as actualized representations, of
every act of language a speaker undertakes. Furthermore, this re-
presenting of our raw experience of the universe in a manmade
form involves situating it in the conceptual framework of one’s

38 Language in the Mind
language. That is, each language formats the experiential data in
its own way, as manifested most clearly by the more or less appre-
ciable differences of vocabulary. Thus in learning their mother
tongue, infants set about acquiring an inner universe of notions –
a universe, because it is constituted for representing everything
that may arise in our experience of the universe around us. This
confrontation between the idea-universe within tongue and our
experience of the universe outside the mind gives us a degree of
independence from the inroads of the world around us and helps
explain why, for Guillaume and many other scholars, language is
the characteristic distinguishing human beings from other animals.
“Man is man through language alone,” according to Humboldt
(cited in Waldron 1985,184). A contemporary philosopher speaks
of being “constantly forced to the conception of man as a language
animal, one who is constituted by language” (Taylor 1985,246).
Guillaume (1984,157) develops this idea as follows:
… accounting for the existence in thinking man of an expanding idea-
universe, destined to grow in quantity and quality, an inner universe that
he alone of all thinking beings is capable of building up within himself.
This idea-universe that the human mind interiorizes and infolds is tongue.
Animals have no tongue since nature has refused them the faculty of
delineating an idea-universe within themselves; they have only discourse-
language, and their discourse, with no mediation of representations,
proceeds directly from experience.
We shall return to Guillaume’s thoughts on the humanizing function
of language in the ﬁnal chapter.
REPRESENTATION AS A HALLMARK OF
THE GUILLAUMIAN APPROACH
The point I am trying to make here is simply this: what we have in
mind to talk about, our extralinguistic experience or knowledge,
is to be distinguished from its linguistic representation as expressed
in a sentence, just as one’s grandmother is quite distinct from some
painting or photograph representing her. There is of course a
similitude between what is represented and its representation, with
the consequence that this distinction is not made by some linguists.
Stern, for example, identiﬁed meaning with our experience when

Words, Words, Words 39
he remarked (45): “The meaning of a word – in actual speech –
is identical with those elements of the user’s (speaker’s or hearer’s)
subjective apprehension of the referent.” As a consequence, he
adopted the position that “when the word camera is used of differ-
ent cameras, the meaning changes in correlation to the change of
referent” (40). Identifying linguistic representation with our ever-
changing experience in this way would make it impossible not only
to consider a word as a meaning-sign unit, as a permanent poten-
tial in tongue available for use whenever required, but also to
explain communication as we know it. This is why it is crucial to
keep in mind the distinction between the extralinguistic intended
message and its linguistic representation, a distinction that is not
a “false dichotomy” but a reality of fundamental importance.
This point is so important that I want to develop it in the larger
context presented by John Taylor (1996,26ff). To contrast Chom-
skyian and Langackerian approaches, he recalls the former’s pos-
tulate of a genetically determined language faculty distinct from
conceptual and pragmatic faculties, with the result that linguistics
is primarily concerned with “linguistic knowledge proper, i.e. lin-
guistic knowledge ‘puriﬁed’ of conceptual and social knowledge”
(27). Thus language processes operate independently of the “central
thought processes” and as a result the linguistic meaning produced
by the language faculty has nothing in common with conceptual
and pragmatic knowledge other than their mental origin and link
with language. In contrast with this modular approach, Taylor (28)
maintains that cognitive grammar “rejects a strict compartmental-
ization of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. Language is
assumed to be essentially symbolic in nature. Meaning is equated
with conceptualization, and language serves to encode a speaker’s
conceptualizations.” As a consequence, the linguistic meaning
expressed by a sentence is not “ontologically distinct” from “a per-
son’s conceptualization of a state of affairs.” In this he echoes
Langacker’s characterizing such distinctions as “false dichotomies”
(1987b,154).
The Guillaumian approach is crucially different from Chomsky’s
since it considers that language is a product of “central thought
processes,” not of genetically determined factors. Like the cogni-
tivist and Jakobsonian approaches, it takes for granted that lan-
guage is essentially symbolic since the purpose of any act of language
is to call to mind the “state of affairs” the speaker has in mind.

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would take up the work of construction and transform our powerless
country, our almost illiterate people, into an exemplary state, which
could serve as a model to other peoples in culture as well as in social
reform.
Faith in the possibility of seeing my country free, my people
developing in material and spiritual plenty, gave me strength,
exalted my powers. I found myself still able to work with the people
and for the people and was grieved to waste time in exile, in the
listlessness of the Siberian taiga. I again made preparations for an
escape, aiming to join my party comrades, who called me, in
revolutionary activity. And again my escape failed. Only two or three
hours separated me from my goal from a sure shelter and it was
painful to fall again into the hands of the enemy after a thousand
miles' journey in the winter.
The thought occurred to me again that they would not pardon me
my attempts to escape, my efforts to identify myself again with the
revolutionary movement. At the same time there pulsed so much life
in my heart that I could not imagine the end of my activities. Neither
the long terms passed in jail nor my exile in Yakutsk had dimmed my
spirit. "I will live through all this," said an inner voice to me; "I will
live through everything and live to see the bright days of freedom."
From Yakutsk I was brought to Irkutsk, and my life here was filled
with the same persecutions as my exile in Kirensk. I fell very ill and
observed how the physicians carefully concealed from me the
danger of my malady. It seemed so strange to me that people could
think of my fatal end when my soul was full of complete faith that
time was bringing me nearer daily to a different kind of end, the
triumph of the revolution.
The longer the war continued the more horrible its consequences
grew, the clearer the rascality of the government manifested itself,
the more patent appeared the inevitableness of the rise of
democracy all over the world, the nearer advanced also our
revolution.

I waited for the sound of the bell announcing freedom, and
wondered why this sound was tardy in making itself heard. When in
November of last year explosions of indignation followed one
another, when irate calls were exchanged among the several groups
of the population, I was already planted with one foot in the Siberian
sleigh, feeling sorry only that the snow road was beginning to melt.
The 17th of March a telegram reached me in Minusinsk announcing
freedom. The same day I was on my way to Atchinsk, the nearest
railroad station. From Atchinsk on began my uninterrupted
communion with soldiers, peasants, workmen, railroad employees,
students and multitudes of beloved women, who to-day all bear the
burdens of the normal and now also abnormal life of a great state.

TALE OF AN AMAZING VOYAGE
German Officers Escape from Spain in a Sailing Vessel
Told by Frederic Lees
The Spanish Premier, Count Romanones, recently stated that
the sensational story of the escape from Spain in a sailing vessel
of a number of interned German officers, as briefly reported in
El Liberal, of Madrid, is officially confirmed. With extraordinary
assurance, the fugitives set out to sail right round the coast of
Great Britain and reach a Belgian port, but the elements and the
British Navy intervened, and the audacious scheme miscarried.
The author's private sources of information have enabled him to
throw light on a number of episodes which, in the Spanish and
German newspapers, were intentionally left obscure. Related in
the Wide World Magazine.
I—AT OFFICE OF GERMAN VICE-CONSUL IN SPANISH PORT
One sunny morning in July, 1916, the German Vice-consul of Vigo
was sitting in his office opposite the wharves of the little Spanish
port. The voluminous contents of his mail-bag lay before him, and at
the moment in question his eyes were intently fixed on a long,
official-looking document—a type-written folio sheet bearing a list of
names, preceded by a memorandum. As he read on, his expression
became more and more serious. Twice he read the document
through, pondering awhile over one of the names. Then he hastily
pressed the electric-bell button on his desk.
The Vice-Consul's clerk, Hermann Fischer, appeared instantly, note-
book and pencil in hand.

"It's too soon yet for the correspondence, Fischer," said the Vice-
Consul, "but I've got here a list of those eleven officers who were
arrested the other day, and who are interned at Pampeluna. I want
you to fetch the Navy List and look up one of the names—Lieutenant
Karl Koch. It looks familiar to me."
Fischer was back in a trice with the desired volume, and, having
hunted out the right man from a multitude of Kochs, proceeded to
read forth the biographical information to the attentive Vice-Consul:
"Karl Koch, born 1873, at Düsseldorf; educated Frankfort and
Heidelberg; joined the Imperial Navy 1890; U-boat lieutenant 1914."
"That'll do!" interjected the official. "I thought it must be the same
man. He and I were at Heidelberg together. Dear old Karl! To think it
has fallen to my lot to do him a good turn! As a matter of fact,
Fischer, we've got to see that Koch and certain others are made as
comfortable as possible during their captivity amongst these blessed
Spaniards. And if there's a chance of doing something more than
that—well, all the better. On that point I've got an answer to this
official communication to dictate to you. Perhaps, as you're here,
you'd better take it down at once; then you can code it and get it on
the wires for the Embassy at Madrid without delay."
Whereupon the Vice-Consul of Vigo proceeded to dictate his secret
message, which showed how very wide his consular duties had
become in wartime—duties such as only Teutonic diplomatic agents
are expected to carry out.
Some people, in relating the part the Vice-Consul played in the
adventure in which Lieutenant Karl Koch and his companions
became involved, contend that it was this officer who was the prime
mover; that it was he who got into touch with the Vice-Consul, who
promised all possible support. But I have reason to believe it was the
other way about, and that the deus ex machina of the whole affair—
from the very moment that the German Vice-Consulate received
official information anent Koch's arrest and internment to the
purchase of the Virgen del Socorro and her departure on her
perilous Odyssey—was the Vice-Consul, whose fortuitous

acquaintanceship with the lieutenant of the submarine (captured and
interned in circumstances which need not here be dwelt upon)
redoubled his official zeal. If that is not so, what of the indiscretions
of his clerk Hermann Fischer? What of those of the intermediaries
through whom the Vice-Consul got possession of the Virgen del
Socorro? What of the convincing evidence of the hotel and lodging-
house keepers of Vigo who, all unknowingly, harbored the fugitives?
What of the incriminating documents in the Vice-Consul's own
handwriting, or that of his clerk, which I am assured came into the
possession of the Spanish authorities?
II—SECRET MESSAGE TO GERMAN EMBASSY IN MADRID
But I will not anticipate events any further. Enough has been said to
enable me to take up the thread of my narrative from the time the
Vice-Consul dispatched his coded message regarding Lieutenant Karl
Koch to the German Embassy in Madrid.
Having signed his despatch and given Fischer sufficient work to keep
him busy until noon, the Vice-Consul sallied forth with a satisfied
mien and walked leisurely, almost aimlessly, towards the quays,
gazing out occasionally over the bay. In the distance could be seen
two German vessels, interned since the beginning of the war, one of
which was the steamship Wehrt. At last, on reaching the deserted
end of one of the quays, the Vice-Consul, glancing quickly over his
shoulder, stopped and gave a low whistle, which was answered
almost immediately by a similar signal and the sound of a boat
grating against the side of the quay.
"Ach so! There you are, José," said the official, as the boatman
became visible. "I was afraid you would be late. You can row me this
morning to the Wehrt."
And with a final precautionary look to right and left, the German
Vice-Consul disappeared over the side and clambered down the iron
rungs of a ladder into the boat.
The captain of the steamship Wehrt, condemned to a captivity which
eternally rankled in his breast, was always ready to extend a hearty

welcome to the Vice-Consul of Vigo. Their periodic meetings,
arranged as far as possible in secret, constituted a safety valve. The
captain could fulminate to his heart's content against the tyrant of
the seas—Great Britain; the Vice-Consul could give full rein to his
taste for intrigue.
Behold these two, then, tête-à-tête in the captain's private room,
and exchanging confidences over the luncheon table. The captain,
deprived of official information for the past three or four days, was
thirsting for news regarding fresh developments in the war, and his
lean, bronzed face lit up with eagerness when he inquired if the
Vice-Consul had anything new and special to report.
"Ya wohl! Something of the greatest importance," replied the official.
"A matter for consultation, and in which your advice will be
valuable."
And the Vice-Consul proceeded to put the skipper au courant with
the bare facts concerning the predicament in which Lieutenant Koch
and his companions found themselves at Pampeluna, the official
request for whatever assistance he could render them, the strange
coincidence of Koch and himself being old college chums, and so on.
III—THE CONSPIRACY IN THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
"It's very evident, captain, that we must do something for them,"
continued the Vice-Consul. "Pampeluna is a long way from Vigo, but
I think something can be done if we put our heads together. I can't
read all that's in the official mind which inspired that memorandum,
but it's quite clear the authorities regard Vigo as the most
convenient open door for Koch and his ten brother-officers. An open
door, provided it is held open for them. The question is, how are we
going to do that? I can see a way of solving part of the difficulty. You
can leave the Pampeluna portion to me. There are plenty of ways of
opening prison doors in a country like this. As a landsman, I am
convinced I can open the land door without much trouble, but it
requires a sailor like you to attend to the sea door. That's way I've
come to you."

"And you couldn't have come to a more willing man," replied the
captain, emphatically. "Try and realize what I've had to suffer on this
infernal ship during the last twenty-three months, with the eyes of
the authorities continually on me and the Wehrt, and every little
jack-in-office sniffing around at unexpected moments, and you'll
understand how I feel for your friend and his companions. Yes,
we've got to do what we can for them. The submarine is the only
effectual weapon left to Germany, so if we succeed in returning to
her eleven of her brave U-boat men we shall truly have done good
patriotic work. Now, at the back of my brain I've got a plan. You're
welcome to it. You know, I suppose, that the Virgen del Socorro is
for sale? She's as tight a little schooner as ever left the port of Vigo.
I've often admired her lines and speed as she sailed past the Wehrt.
Now, when this war is over and we've reduced everybody's tonnage,
save our own, to a minimum, the Virgen del Socorro will be worth
her weight in gold. At the price she is going at to-day the boat is a
splendid speculation. Why don't you buy her? You'd find it worth
your while, I think, to be the sleeping partner."
"Not at all a bad idea, captain. But are you certain the Virgen del
Socorro is in the market? I thought it was owned by the brothers Z
——, who have always looked upon the schooner as a sort of child of
theirs."
"That is so. But ties of the closest affection have to be broken in
these troubled times, and the brothers Z—— have decided to
dissolve partnership. I dare say your boatman José, who ought to be
well up in harbor gossip, will be able to tell you all about that.
There's no doubt my information is correct. I can even tell you the
exact figure at which the owners are willing to sell—eleven thousand
five hundred pesetas."
"Dirt cheap, considering the times," said the Vice-Consul,
thoughtfully. He took an extra long pull at his beer tankard, and
then, bringing the blue earthenware vessel down on the table with a
bang, exclaimed, "By Jove, captain, you've put me on the right track!
I'm beginning to see the way to do it. Listen!"

The plan unfolded was as follows. Using his boatman as an
intermediary—José was generally believed to be fairly well-to-do—he
would enter into negotiations with the brothers Z—— for the
purchase of the Virgen del Socorro. One of the conditions of the
agreement would be particularly tempting to the owners. On the
understanding that the purchase was kept secret—the rumor might
indeed be set afloat that the brothers had decided not to part with
their dearly-beloved boat—they should be allowed to retain
possession until the very last moment before the schooner was
required by the new proprietors. There was evidently a double
advantage in this: it would allay any suspicions which inquisitive
harbor authorities or other officials might have whilst preparations
were being made on board the Virgen del Socorro for the reception
of the fugitives from Pampeluna, and it would enable the Vice-
Consul, the captain, and other helpers to carry out those
preparations at their leisure. No one could say how long it would
take them to prepare the road to the "open door" of Vigo. Though
the Vice-Consul's secret service fund was still well supplied, it was no
good to minimize the difficulties, which were greater than the
captain of the Wehrt could possibly comprehend until he had
explained the full extent of his plan.
The Virgen del Socorro was to be sent right round the British Isles,
in order to descend the North Sea unobserved, and, flying the Dutch
flag, reach a Belgian port. It was a risky plan, but, the British Navy
notwithstanding, the conspirators thought it had possibilities of
success. The Vice-Consul, in assisting the scheme, proposed to make
the Fatherland a present of more than the eleven officers at
Pampeluna.
It was advisable to get as many able-bodied German subjects on
board as possible, and so he planned to include in the party of
fugitives nine others, including four officers from the Goeben, a
naval doctor, a law student, and two sailors, none of whom was
interned, in addition to a sergeant interned at Alcala de Henares,
seventeen miles north-east of Madrid. Twenty was certainly a large
crew for a schooner of the Virgen del Socorro's size, but the voyage

was to be undertaken during the summer—and an exceptionally fine
summer, too—so the risk of a mishap, provided there was good
seamanship, was slight. As this question of weather was important,
the Vice-Consul proposed to see to the purchase of the vessel
without delay, and to communicate at once with Lieutenant Koch.
IV—SECRET PURCHASE OF SHIP—TO ESCAPE
Within the next few days the secret purchase by the Vice-Consul of
Vigo of the Virgen del Socorro was an accomplished fact, and he had
had his first interview at Pampeluna with his old friend, Lieutenant
Koch. Other meetings followed, at intervals of a week or so, and
before the end of the month, thanks to a lavish "greasing" of palms,
the arrangements for the escape of the eleven officers and their
concentration with other fugitives at Vigo were all made. The captain
of the Wehrt, as surreptitiously as possible, bought inordinate
quantities of provisions and stores during July, in order that José and
the others might, at the opportune moment, tranship a part of them
to the Virgen del Socorro.
At last everything was ready. Nothing remained to be done but for
someone to send a signal from Pampeluna to the Vice-Consul at
Vigo, who was to pass it on to other quarters. But the signal, so
eagerly awaited on the appointed day, August 4th, never came!
Instead, two days later came a letter of explanation, stating that
Lieutenant Karl Koch had fallen ill at the critical moment. The plan of
escape, therefore, had to be indefinitely postponed. It was a bitter
disappointment to the Vice-Consul, who pictured himself being
reproached by his superiors for building castles in the air, if not
being saddled with the whole of the expenses. But he consoled
himself, in the presence of the captain of the Wehrt, with the
argument that it was "just as well, since it would allow the
authorities time to go to sleep." The astute seaman could not,
however, quite agree with this. He knew the advantage of fine
weather for such a perilous voyage as the one projected, and feared
that if the escape were not effected soon it might be too late or too
full of risk to be worth undertaking.

Lieutenant Koch's illness dragged on for week after week. August
went by, September came, and the hopes of the Vice-Consul of Vigo
fell lower and lower. In the first three weeks in September the officer
entered the convalescent stage. One result of his breakdown was,
indeed, in his favor; he was allowed greater and greater liberty, and,
on the plea of taking the air, got out several times in a motor-car,
with the authorization of the governor and doctor of the prison and
under the discreet eye of an official. Soon even this supervision was
relaxed, and then, when October came in, the U-boat lieutenant saw
the chance for which he and his companions had been waiting. It
was about this time that the Vice-Consul of Vigo (now almost on the
verge of despair) unexpectedly received the long-awaited warning.
V—PLOT LAID FOR THE FLIGHT
On the morning of October 5th, Lieutenant Koch and his
companions, having obtained a pass for an unofficial "joy ride" in
two motor-cars, set out for a little country village some twenty miles
from Pampeluna. As they were all on parole and the chauffeurs of
the hired cars were connected with the police, permission was given
to the party to remain at their destination for luncheon. It was
understood, however, that as soon as the meal was over the return
journey should be made, so as to be back well before the day was
declining. Koch and his friends, through intermediaries introduced to
him by the Vice-Consul of Vigo, laid their plans very cleverly. Just
outside the village is a rustic inn where excellent luncheons are
served. The dining-room looks out, at the back of the house, on to a
garden with a bowling-alley and arbor, and this garden adjoins
meadows, bordered by the railway line. Not far away is the little
country railway station. What happened can easily be imagined.
The eleven officers had their luncheon served in the restaurant
proper; the chauffeurs were served in a smaller room adjoining,
looking out on to the front and the road. The landlord had been
instructed (and had been well paid in advance for this and other
little services) to ply these two worthy fellows with as much liquor as
they could hold, with the result that they were deep in their cups

long before the boisterous officers had got through their coffee and
liqueurs. They were in such an advanced state of intoxication,
indeed, that they took no heed when a singular silence followed the
noise of voices and laughter in the adjoining room; and it was not
until the appointed hour for departure had long since passed that
they recovered their senses sufficiently to learn the truth. Their
erstwhile "joy riders" had flown! They might have been seen, fully
three-quarters of an hour before, strolling down the garden and
making their way, as unobstrusively as possible, across the fields to
the countryside railway station, where, provided beforehand with
tickets for different stations on the line to Vigo, they boarded the
train, once more in as nonchalant a manner as possible in groups of
twos and threes, in different carriages. By the time the chauffeurs
came to their senses and realized they had been fooled, the fugitives
were well out of danger and, having got together again at the first
big stopping-place, had put themselves en règle as regards through
tickets for their common destination, to which they continued to
travel, however, separately, in order to minimize the risks of capture.
The outwitted chauffeurs had another unpleasant surprise on
rushing to their cars, with the object of dashing back to Pampeluna
and recounting to the authorities their sorry tale of misadventure.
Though they cranked their machines like madmen, the motors
stubbornly refused to work. The reason soon became evident: the
sparking-plugs had been removed by the far-seeing Koch.
Meanwhile, on October 2nd, the interned Sergeant Dietrich
Gratschuss had slipped away from Alcala. His escape, facilitated by
the four uninterned officers from the Goeben, who provided him
with a suit of civilian clothes, thrown over a wall into the prison-
garden where he worked daily, was made doubly sure by certain
judicious bribes to a sentry, who kept his back turned and eyes
averted at the critical moment. Gratschuss slipped into his disguise
in a tool-shed, and calmly walked out of the prison-yard—saluted by
the unsuspecting man on guard—as though he had been a visitor.
His friends were waiting round the corner for him with a hundred
horsepower motor-car, in which, with the other uninterned Germans

(the naval doctor, the law student, and the two sailors), he was
whirled away at sixty miles an hour. The whole of the journey to
Vigo was made in this powerful car, which the owners had been able
to provide with an amply supply of petrol and food for a long and
rapid flight, lasting well into the night.
The whole of the machinery of the Vice-Consul of Vigo was now in
motion. All the fugitives reached that port in safety and scattered
themselves over hotels and lodging-houses.
A hue and cry was, of course, set up from Pampeluna and Alcala de
Henares; but the Spanish police went off on various wrong tracks
before they thought of ordering a watch to be set at all the ports.
Even when this tardy step was taken, no one ever suspected—so
well had the Vice-Consul and his accomplices laid their plans—that
Vigo was the port from which the escape was to be effected.
VI—MIDNIGHT—THE FUGITIVES BOARD THE SHIP
On October 6th the Virgen del Socorro, to allay any suspicion, made
a voyage to sea, and, on returning, moored alongside the Wehrt.
Then, one pitch-black night, the fugitives left their hiding-places.
One by one they slipped out into the darkness and, following the
narrowest and most deserted streets leading to the harbor, reached
the quays unobserved. At such an hour of the night—it was getting
on for eleven o'clock—they could be fairly certain of meeting no one,
save, perhaps, a drunken sailor or two. These revellers took no more
notice of Koch and his companions than they did of their own dim
shadows. One by one, under cover of the darkness, the fugitives
disappeared down the same iron ladder the Vice-Consul had used so
often, into José's boat.
By midnight all the fugitives were on board the Wehrt, from whose
well-replenished store-rooms they immediately began transhipping
the provisions to the Virgen del Socorro. All through the night and
until 2 A.M. this work continued. The Virgen del Socorro was then
towed out a little farther into the bay, and on the first signs of
daylight appearing her bow was turned north-east. Soon afterwards

a fresh early morning wind sprang up from the land, her sails filled,
and she set off on her long voyage.
What happened to the Virgen del Socorro I will now relate, in
accordance with details furnished by various members of her crew.
The little vessel had no sooner left Vigo and got out into the open
than the land wind suddenly increased in strength and drove her into
exceedingly rough and treacherous water. Some of the crew were for
turning back, despite the risks that step would have entailed, and
the matter was discussed at some length by Lieutenant Koch and the
other leaders. They came to the conclusion, however, that they were
"between the devil and the deep sea," and must keep on. It seems
doubtful, indeed, whether, had they decided to make an attempt to
get back to Vigo, they could have accomplished it.
That first day, and for many days afterwards, the Virgen del Socorro
became a veritable plaything of the waves, which soon began to rise
mountain-high. The sufferings of the crowded fugitives in this
terrible weather were intense. All were drenched to the skin, and for
more than three days and nights they had to remain in this
miserable condition. To these tortures were added the craving for
sleep and adequate nourishment, for, amidst the continual buffeting
of the waves and wind, they could neither sleep nor get anything
cooked. Under these conditions, it was not surprising that the twenty
occupants of the Virgen del Socorro were finally reduced to the state
of not caring what happened. One of the two sailors on board, on
whose shoulders devolved much of the work of navigation, said that,
"old seaman though he was, he had never before experienced such
weather." He felt at times that "all his strength and hope were
sapped," and hourly, during those terrible first six days, when the
little schooner was tossed about like a cork, "expected death would
relieve him of his tortures."
The storm then calmed down a little and gave the fugitives a respite.
They were able to dry their drenched clothes and attend to the
needs of the inner man. At the same time they could pay more
attention to the question of their course. On this score they were

soon to receive a shock, for there hove in sight a vessel that was
undoubtedly a British patrol. For a couple of hours there were many
anxious searchings of heart on board the Virgen del Socorro. Would
she, thanks to her insignificance and the Dutch flag flying from her
mast, be taken for an inoffensive fishing smack, and be allowed to
go unchallenged? That had been part of their plan all through.
At one moment it looked as though the patrol was bearing down
upon them at full speed; but when the dreaded vessel got no bigger,
but instead gradually receded into the distance, the crew of the
Virgen del Socorro realized that for the time being they were safe.
VII—FOILED BY A STORM—THE CAPTURE
Safe from the clutches of their human enemies, perhaps, but by no
means safe from the angry sea. Had some of the crew been able to
foresee what was in store for them, they would perhaps have
welcomed the arrival of that British patrol with outspread arms and
expressions of joy. Once more they were caught up in the embrace
of a furious storm, and driven helplessly westward, expecting every
moment to be their last.
On October 24th another brief calm set in, enabling the navigator to
ascertain his position. The little vessel was found to be some
distance west of Bantry, on the south coast of Ireland. Here the
storm again increased in violence, and once more the ill-fated Virgen
del Socorro seemed likely to founder. A consultation was held by
Koch and the other leaders. They came to the conclusion that it
would be madness to attempt to continue with the original plan. In
such seas as were running, they would run the risk of being
shipwrecked a hundred times before they got halfway round the
British Isles. The only thing to be done, if they were to prevent the
Virgen del Socorro from being smashed to matchwood on the British
coast, was to keep as much as possible in the open sea and steer for
the English channel, in hope of making the Belgian or Dutch coast
unobserved.

Six more terrible days followed. By this time more than half the crew
of the Virgen del Socorro were in a parlous condition. Their store of
provisions had shrunk to such an extent that everybody had to be
placed on rations, and the fresh water had dwindled so alarmingly
that it was reserved for those who were actually on the point of
collapse. Several of the crew, through the cold and constant
seasickness, were utterly helpless.
It was about this time that the coast of Cornwall came into view, and
on November 4th the crew found themselves in sight of Lundy
Island, at the entrance of the Bristol Channel. From there,
proceeding with a slowness which must often have driven them to
the verge of despair, they circled the Scilly Islands, and it took them
two more dreadful days before they had rounded the Lizard.
The Odyssey of the Virgen del Socorro had now stretched over no
less a period than a month. Three of the crew had by now become
delirious; all were reduced to half their ordinary weight, and with the
exception of the hardened seamen were on the point of collapse.
Although they had experienced several alarms, they had so far
succeeded—no doubt owing to the awful weather—in avoiding the
vigilant eyes of the British patrols. But now they no longer cared one
way or the other; all the fight had been knocked out of them by
their sufferings.
On November 8th the little vessel approached the Goodwins. Shortly
after dawn a British destroyer was sighted and reported by the man
at the helm. Hardly a man on board, unless it was Lieutenant Koch,
took the trouble to raise his glassy eyes when he heard the danger
announced. Nor did they manifest any concern when it further
became evident that there was no avoiding the vigilant war vessel.
Nothing expressed so eloquently the fact that they regarded
themselves as beaten as their attitude of utter indifference when
they were challenged by the British destroyer. One and all were
evidently heartily glad to confess their nationality, the circumstances
in which they came to be there, and the extraordinary dangers
through which they had passed.

The Virgen del Socorro was taken into Ramsgate, says El Liberal, the
Madrid newspaper which published the first brief account of the
adventures related above, and there we may well leave Lieutenant
Koch and his companions. They are henceforth in safe keeping, for,
with all their ingenuity and daring, the only thing they succeeded in
doing was to exchange one prison for another, and at the same time
drag eight free German citizens with them into durance vile.

THE POET'S DEATH IN BATTLE—
HOW ALLEN SEEGER DIED
A Young American in the Foreign Legion
Told by Bif Bear, a Young Egyptian in the Foreign Legion
The artists of Europe—the painters, poets, singers—the
æsthetes of France and Italy, of Britain and Russian, and of
Germany, the Hungarian musicians—all answered the "call of
war" and threw their souls into the "rendezvous with death."
Thousands of them died on the battlefields. Among them is the
young English poet, Rupert Brooke, and the American poet,
Allan Seeger, who "loved France and gave his life to her." This
young American enlisted early in the war in the Foreign Legion.
He was fighting in the battles in Champagne in July, 1916, when
he fell. A young Egyptian, who was with the poet in the
trenches, tells of his end. After the battle, he wrote this letter to
Mrs. Caroline L. Weeks, of Boston, who has acted in the rôle of
"marraine" (godmother) to many American volunteers. The
following is a translation from the French forwarded from Paris.
I—STORY OF THE AMERICAN POET
It was in the Thiescourt Woods, I remember, that I saw Alan on his
return from convalescent leave. My section was in first line trenches
and his, in reserve, in the second line. I was on soup fatigue and
was going to the Chauffour Quarry when I saw him in front of me,
walking along alone. Throwing down the marmites (tin receptacles)
with which I was loaded, I rushed to shake him by the hand. He
had, it seemed to me, grown slightly thinner, his pale face seemed

slightly paler, and his eyes, his fine eyes with their far-away look,
ever lost in distant contemplation, were still as dreamy as ever.
He told me how sorry he was not to be still with me as he had been
transferred to the first section and I belonged to the third. But we
saw each other every day. He would recount the joys of his two
months' convalescent leave, and I shall never forget how one phrase
was often on his lips, "Life is only beautiful if divided between war
and love. They are the only two things truly great, fine and perfect,
everything else is but petty and mean. I have known love for the last
few weeks in all its beauty and now I want to make war, ... but fine
war, a war of bayonet charges, the desperate pursuit of an enemy in
flight, the entry as conqueror, with trumpets sounding, into a town
that we have delivered! Those are the delights of war! Where in civil
life can be found any emotion so fine and strong as those?"
And we would exalt our spirits with hopes of making an assault with
the bayonet, hopes that were not doomed to disappointment, for a
few weeks later we were to attack.
II—AN ODE TO AMERICAN PATRIOTISM
One day while we were in reserve at the Martin Quarries Alan came
to look for me. He was full of joy and showed me a telegram that he
had received from Paris, asking him to compose a poem which he
himself was to read in public at a Franco-American manifestation, for
which he was to receive forty-eight hours' leave. Alan was overjoyed
at the opportunity of obtaining leave, but was too retiring to think of
reading his poem himself; he would try, he told me, to have it read
by some one else.
The eve of the ceremony arrived—I cannot recall the date—but no
leave came. We were in the trenches and chance had placed me
near Seeger in "petit poste" (the small outlook post, some yards in
advance of the first line trench). He confessed that he had lost all
hope of going, and I tried to find all sorts of arguments to encourage
him, that his leave might come at dawn, and that by taking the train

at Ressons at 7 A.M. he could still reach Paris by noon and would
have plenty of time, as the ceremony was at 2.
The morning came, and instead of bringing the much desired
permission to leave it brought a terrible downpour of rain, and the
day passed sadly. He found consolation in the thought that July 4
would soon arrive, when the Americans with the Foreign Legion
might hope for forty-eight hours' leave, as last year. Alas! He little
thought that on that date....
[The ceremony referred to was held on May 30, in connection with
Decoration Day celebrations. Wreaths to the Americans killed for
France were placed around the statue of Washington and Lafayette,
in the Place des Etats-Unis, Paris. By an unfortunate mistake the
forty-eight hours' leave granted for the event was made for June 30
instead of May 30. The ode which Alan Seeger composed for the
occasion was printed in The Sun a few days after the author had
fallen in battle.]
On June 21 we left the sector of the Thiescourt Woods for an
unknown destination, which proved to be the Somme. We took the
train at Estrees St. Denis and on June 22 about 10 A.M. reached
Boves. Under a blazing sun, in heat that seemed to have escaped
from the furnace of hell, we started for Bayonviller. We had
undergone no such march since the war began.
Weighed down by their sacks, prostrated by the heat, men fell by
hundreds along the road. Hardly twenty of the 200 forming the
company arrived without having left the column. Seeger was one of
these few. He told me afterward of the terrible effort he had had to
make not to give up. At every halt he drank a drop of "tafia" (rum
and coffee) to "give himself heart," and when he reached the end of
the march he was worn out, but proud—he had not left the ranks.
We passed the eight days of repose at Bayonviller, almost always
together, seeking the greatest possible enjoyment in our life at the
moment and making dreams for the future after the war. Alan
confided to me that "after the war" caused him fear—that he could

not tell what destiny reserved for him, but that if the fates smiled on
him it was toward the Orient that he would make. He loved the
Orient—Constantinople, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut had a powerful
fascination for him; their names would plunge him into profound
reverie.
"It is in the mysterious frame of the Orient," he used to say, "in its
dazzling light, in its blue, blue nights, among the perfumes of
incense and hashish, that I would live, love and die."
And then the talk would turn again on the war and he would say:
"My only wish now is to make a bayonet charge. After that I shall
see. Death may surprise me, but it shall not frighten me. It is my
destiny. 'Mektoub' (it is written)." He was a real fatalist and drew
courage and resignation from his fatalism.
During the night of June 30-July 1 (1916) we left Bayonviller to
move nearer the firing line. We went to Proyart as reserves.
At 8 o'clock on the morning of July 1 there was roll call for the day's
orders and we were told that the general offensive would begin at 9
without us, as we were in reserve, and that we would be notified of
the day and hour that we were to go into action.
When this report was finished we were ordered to shell fatigue,
unloading 8 inch shells from automobile trucks which brought them
up to our position.
All was hustle and bustle. The Colonial regiments had carried the
first German lines and thousands and thousands of prisoners kept
arriving and leaving. Ambulances filed along the roads continuously.
As news began to arrive we left our work to seek more details,
everything we could learn seemed to augur well.
About 4 P.M. we left Proyart for Fontaine-les-Capy and in the first
line. Alan was beaming with joy and full of impatience for the order
to join in the action. Everywhere delirious joy reigned at having
driven the enemy back without loss for us. We believed that no
further resistance would be met and that our shock attack would
finish the Germans. After passing the night at Fontaine-les-Capy we

moved in the morning toward what had been the German first lines.
I passed almost all the day with Alan. He was perfectly happy.
"My dream is coming true," he said to me, "and perhaps this evening
or to-morrow we shall attack. I am more than satisfied, but it's too
bad about our July 4 leave. I cannot hope to see Paris again now
before the 6th or 7th, but if this leave is not granted me 'Mektoub!
Mektoub'!" he finished with a smile.
The field of battle was relatively calm, a few shells fell, fired by the
enemy in retreat, and our troops were advancing on all sides. The
Colonials had taken Assevillers and the next day we were to take
their place in first line.
On July 3 (1916) about noon we moved toward Assevillers to relieve
the Colonials at nightfall. Alan and I visited Assevillers, picking up
souvenirs, postcards, letters, soldiers' notebooks and chattering all
the time, when suddenly a voice called out, "The company will fall in
to go to the first line."
III—LAST PARTINGS OF COMRADES
Before leaving one another we made each other the same promise
as we had made before the Champagne battle (September 25,
1915), that if one of us fell so severely wounded that there was no
hope of escape the other would finish him off with a bullet in the
heart rather than let him await death in lingering torture. He showed
me his revolver, saying, "I have more luck than you. If I can still use
one arm I shall have no need of any one," and then we rejoined our
different sections.
About 4 o'clock the order came to get ready for the attack. None
could help thinking of what the next few hours would bring. One
minute's anguish and then, once in the ranks, faces become calm
and serene, a kind of gravity falling upon them, while on each could
be read the determination and expectation of victory.
Two battalions were to attack Belloy-en-Santerre, our company being
the reserve of battalion. The companies forming the first wave were
deployed on the plain. Bayonets glittered in the air above the corn,

already quite tall. Scarcely had the movement begun when the
enemy perceived them and started a barrier fire (artillery fire to bar
any advance), the quick firers started their rapid, regular crackerlike
rat-tat. Bullets whizzed and shells exploded almost as they left the
gun, making a din infernal. And the wave went forward, always
forward, leaving behind the wounded and the dead.
The losses were heavy and the enemy made a desperate resistance.
The company of reserve was ordered to advance with the second
wave of assault. "Forward!" cried the Captain, and the company
deployed "in files of squadron," advancing slowly but surely under
the enemy's intense and murderous fire.
The first section (Alan's section) formed the right and vanguard of
the company, and mine formed the left wing. After the first bound
forward, we lay flat on the ground, and I saw the first section
advancing beyond us and making toward the extreme right of the
village of Belloy-en-Santerre. I caught sight of Seeger and called to
him, making a sign with my hand.
He answered with a smile. How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood
out on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his
section. His head erect and pride in his eyes, I saw him running
forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the
last time I saw my friend.
"Forward!" And we made a second bound, right to the wave of
assault, which we left behind a little, and down we threw ourselves
again. The fusillade became more and more intense, reaching a
paroxysm. The mitrailleuses mow men down and the cannons
thunder in desperation. Bodies are crushed and torn to fragments by
the shells, and the wounded groan as they await death, for all hope
of escaping alive from such a hell has fled.
The air is saturated with the smell of powder and blood, everywhere
the din is deafening; men are torn with impatience at having to
remain without moving under such a fire. We struggle even for
breath and cries resound from every side. Suddenly a word of

command, an order of deliverance, passes from mouth to mouth.
"Forward! With bayonets!"—the command that Seeger had awaited
so long.
IV—THE POET'S DEATH ON THE BATTLEFIELD
In an irresistible, sublime dash we hurl ourselves to the assault,
offering our bodies as a target. It was at this moment that Alan
Seeger fell heavily wounded in the stomach. His comrades saw him
fall and crawl into the shelter of a shell hole. Since that minute
nobody saw him alive.
I will spare you an account of the rest of the battle. As soon as the
enemy was driven back and Belloy-en-Santerre won I searched for
news of Seeger. I was told of his wound and was glad of it, for I
thought he had been carried away and henceforth would be far from
the dangers of bullets and shells.
Thus ended this Fourth of July that Seeger had hoped to celebrate in
Paris. On the next day we were relieved from the first lines and went
into reserve lines. A fatigue party was left to identify the dead.
Seeger was found dead. His body was naked, his shirt and tunic
being beside him and his rifle planted in the ground with the butt in
the air. He had tied a handkerchief to the butt to attract the
attention of the stretcher bearers. He was lying on his side with his
legs bent.
It was at night by the light of a pocket electric lamp that he was
hastily recognized. Stretcher bearers took the body and buried it
next day in the one big grave made for the regiment, where lie a
hundred bodies. This tomb is situated at the hill 76 to the south of
Belloy-en-Santerre.
As I think of the circumstances of his death I am convinced that
after undressing to bandage himself he must have risen and been
struck by a second bullet. I asked permission on the night of July 6
(1916) when I heard of his being wounded, to go and see him, but I
was refused.

THE GUARDIAN OF THE LINE—HERO
TALE OF LITHUANIA
Told by Frederic Lees
One of the most remarkable facts connected with the war on
the Russian front is the large number of women who have
distinguished themselves by conspicuous bravery, sometimes in
the actual fighting-line, but more often in a civilian capacity.
This story deals with the ordeal undergone by a humble railway-
crossing keeper's wife in Lithuania, as told in the Wide World
Magazine.
I—"THE LONELIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD"
One morning in April, 1915, Stephania Ychas, the wife of the keeper
of a railway-crossing to the north of the Lithuanian town of Shavli,
felt the saddest and loneliest woman in the world. Do what she
could, she found it impossible to rid herself of the feeling that a
catastrophe was imminent—that the terrible war into which her
country had been plunged meant the end of all things. Poor
Lithuania! Once so fair a place, now so desolate a wilderness!
Stephania's duties, in these troubled times, kept her continually on
the qui vive. At all hours of the day—and latterly during many of the
night—she had to be in and out of her little house, in order to see
that the rails were clear, or to note the numbers of the troop trains
as they swept past towards the north. Backwards and forwards,
from her door to the telephone, fixed against the wall on the right-
hand side of a little window through which she could overlook a big
sweep of the line in the direction of Shavli, she went, welcoming the
never-ending succession of trainloads of soldiers, wounded, or mere

war material passing on to the new line of defence, and reporting
their progress to the railway and military authorities.
Day after day, night after night, the great retreat of the Russian
forces continued, until, single-handed as she was, Stephania Ychas
was almost dropping with fatigue. A hundred times she told herself
that human flesh and blood could never stand such a strain. It was
not the fatigue alone which was crushing her. Added to her physical
tortures were mental ones, the feeling of being alone, so horribly
alone, and the knowledge that the enemy, as announced by the
retreat and the nerve-racking booming of the guns, was rapidly
advancing on Shavli, and that until Russia had had time to recover,
the hated Teutons would inevitably overrun Lithuania as far as Vilna.
At night her brain was filled with pictures of burning farms, ravaged
orchards, and indescribable scenes of brutality such as she knew the
German soldiers had been guilty of in Belgium and Poland.
A dozen times a day, dizzy and sick at heart, she had been on the
point of staggering to the telephone to inform the commander of a
neighbouring station that she could continue no longer. But a sense
of duty had held her back. When it came to a point of renunciation,
her stout Lithuanian heart said "Nay," and she recalled the parting
from her husband and his final adjurations.
Buried in thought, while waiting for a train which has just been
signalled from Shavli, she recalled the morning when Michael Ychas,
suddenly called to the Colours, had left her. It seemed like an
eternity since those days of the mobilization.
II—"GOOD-BYE, STEPHANIA—GUARD THE LINE WELL!"
"Good-bye, Stephania," he had said. "Be of good cheer whilst I am
away, and guard the line well. It is sad to leave you here all alone.
Sad to be obliged to leave one's native country and abandon it to
unknown dangers. How much better I should have liked to have
defended Lithuania, I, a Lithuanian bred and born, than to have
been drafted into a regiment bound for the Caucasus. As if the
Government could not trust us in our own country! However,

Stephania, you are left, and you are doing a man's duty. It makes
me happy, in the midst of my misery, to think that you are there to
look after the home and the crossing and the rails. Guard them well,
Stephania, and rest assured that, in my absence, I shall constantly
pray to the Virgin to watch over you."
Her reflections were interrupted by a shriek from the locomotive of
the expected train, which was made up partly of compartments
packed with soldiers, partly of wagons filled with the most
heterogeneous collection of things she had ever seen in her life—
pieces of machinery piled one on the top of the other, heaps of
metal articles of every imaginable description, and every scrap of
copper or lead, apparently, which Shavli contained. A waving of
hands from the soldiers, a friendly yell from a hundred throats, and
the train had sped on its way.
Stephania Ychas had no time now to waste over daydreaming.
Hurrying into her cottage, she went straight to the telephone and
rang up the commander of the station farther up the line. After
ringing in vain for fully a minute, she got the connection and made
her report.
"Train number three hundred and forty-six passed North Shavli
crossing a minute ago," she said. "A mixed train, men and materials.
Any news?"
"Shavli reports that things are getting warm," replied a voice. "I
should not be surprised to hear that we have to leave before the
day's out. You'd better 'phone to headquarters."
She lost not a moment in carrying out the suggestion.
"Halloa, halloa! Is that Shavli?"
"Yes," came a quick answer. "You're the North Shavli crossing-
keeper, aren't you? Good! Well, we were just about to call you up.
Matters are coming to a climax here. There are only two more trains
to go through now. One with men will be with you in a couple of
minutes at the latest; the other, with goods, should follow ten
minutes afterwards. We are telling the driver to pick you up."

At this point the speaker was called away from the telephone, and
an indistinct buzz as of a whole office in conversation, mingled with
the trampling of feet and the slamming of doors followed. But finally
the speaker returned.
"Halloa, halloa! Are you still there, North Shavli? Telephone forward
all I have said, and prepare them for the worst."
Stephania Ychas, now tingling with excitement, did as she was bid.
Once more she stood on duty to see the reported train pass, and
again she went to the telephone to send her report forward. Having
finished, she was about to hang up the receiver when, on looking
through the window on her left, her eyes caught sight of something
unusual far down the line, almost at the point where the metals
curved out of view. To run and fetch a pair of glasses which, ever
since the beginning of the war, she had kept hanging in their leather
case by the side of the fireplace, to bring them to bear on the point
in question, and at the same time to ring up Shavli, was the work of
a minute. What she saw, though her calm voice in no way revealed
her inner emotion, made the blood run cold through her veins.
"Halloa, halloa! Are you there, Shavli?"
A reply came in the affirmative.
"For Heaven's sake remain at the 'phone. There's foul work going on
near the great curve. You must give orders at once to keep back the
train."
"One moment, and I will return," replied the railway official.
III—A WOMAN'S MESSAGE: "THEY ARE DYNAMITING THE
RAILROAD!"
A pause, which seemed to the woman with the glasses fixed to her
eyes an eternity, followed.
"You were just in time," continued the voice to her infinite relief.
"Courage! Fear not. Orders have been given to pick you up, with the
others along the line, when we evacuate the town by car. But tell us
what is happening."

"I can see a number of men tampering with the metals," telephoned
Stephania Ychas. "They have dismounted from their horses. One of
them, an officer, is giving orders. Yes, I can see now. They are
Uhlans, and are going to dynamite the line. There are at least
twenty of them, evidently a portion of an advance guard that has
made a turning movement round Shavli by way of the woods.
Halloa, halloa! In the name of Our Lady of Vilna, do not leave the
instrument. It is a blessing they did not begin by cutting the wire.
Now they are scattering to await the explosion. There!"—as the
speaker beheld the explosion, followed by a cloud of smoke and
dust, which rose high in the air—"it is done. Holy Virgin! They are
making off now. No, the officer is pointing here. They are coming
towards me. Telephone to the nearest military station to send me
help immediately. And for the love of the saints, come back to the
instrument!"
Stephania Ychas left the receiver dangling by its cords, and made
her little home ready to withstand a siege. She locked and doubly
bolted the door, and with the object of giving the Uhlans the idea
that the place was uninhabited prepared to block up the windows
with the boards which, as in most Lithuanian country cottages,
served as shutters, fastened from the inside.
"Perhaps," she thought, "if they see the house shuttered, they will
conclude it is uninhabited and will ride away."
Unfortunately, the Uhlans rode quickly, and Stephania had more than
she could do with just one shutter, that which protected the little
window on the left of the telephone, and which, when up, plunged
the room into semi-darkness. Whilst she was fixing this barrier, the
Uhlans surrounded the house and the officer momentarily caught
sight of her. Simultaneously there came a violent knocking at the
door with the butt-end of a rifle, a command to open, and the sharp
crack of a revolver. A bullet crashed through one of the panes,
traversed the centre of the shutter-board, and buried itself in the
opposite wall.

The brave woman was now back at the telephone, but not before
she had managed to make the entrance to her home doubly sure by
dragging a heavy dresser against it.
"Halloa, Shavli! You have sent for help? Thank you. They have
surrounded the house, and are trying to force an entrance. They
have discovered that I am here. But they will have a difficulty in
forcing open the door, unless——"
She paused and listened. There was a long and ominous silence,
which made her think at first that the enemy must have decided it
was not worth while to waste further time over a woman. But the
hope was short-lived. She heard a sharp command in German, the
sound of muffled voices, a burst of laughter, and the clatter of
horses' hoofs around the house. What was happening? Were they
really riding off?
Again her hopes were shattered. The scampering backwards and
forwards continued, one of the horses neighed, and she imagined
she could almost hear the Uhlans' heavy breathing, sounds which
brought back to her the danger which she had hesitated to frame in
words. Very soon her fears were confirmed. A vision flashed to her
brain and made her sick with fear. A faint cracking sound broke upon
her ears from several points simultaneously, spreading until it
seemed to envelope her on all sides, and especially over her head.
By slow degrees the crackling grew to a roar, and then she fully
realized what the barbarians had done.
IV—"HELP! HELP!"—A VOICE FROM THE BURNING THATCH
"Help, help!" called Stephania into the telephone. "They have fired
the thatch. For Heaven's sake, send me help. But a few minutes and
the rafters, I fear, will catch fire. Are you still there, Shavli? Oh,
speak—speak!"
An exclamation, mingled sorrow and anger, came from the
telephonist at Shavli.
"Oh, the ruffians, the abominable assassins!" he cried. "I beseech
you to have courage. Help is surely on the way."

"I will try to be brave and do my duty to the end, as Michael told
me," replied Stephania, as though to herself. "But unless they come
soon, it will be too late. The thatch has burnt like tinder. I can hear
the flames roaring like a furnace underneath the rafters. There! One
of them has given way and fallen on to the joists of my room.
Already the heat is suffocating, the smoke almost unbearable. Holy
Virgin! What a death."
"Alas, what more can we do than beg you to bear up?" returned the
voice at Shavli, in an agonized tone. "We have just been informed
that a party of Cossacks left twenty minutes ago to rescue you. Once
more, courage! And may Our Lady of Vilna indeed protect you."
When Stephania Ychas next spoke through the telephone the roof
fell in with a crash and pierced a hole, through which the burning
embers fell, in the ceiling of her room. At the same time
communication with Shavli was suddenly interrupted, either through
the Uhlans having discovered and cut the wire, or, as is more
probable, owing to the fire having fused the terminals. She could
not, however, have sustained her appeals for help much longer.
Indeed, it was not many minutes afterwards that, stupefied and
blinded by the smoke, as she groped her way to the door in an
instinctive movement towards the open air, she sank to the floor
unconscious.
It is a characteristic of the Cossacks, many times admitted even by
German military critics, and those who have been describing the
operations in Lithuania for the enemy Press, that they rarely if ever
waste a shot. Unlike the French cavalry, they do not fire from a
distance, but fearlessly swoop down upon their adversaries and seek
to bring them down, one by one, at a range of but a few yards. And
that was the fate of the Uhlans, who, hungering to feast their eyes
and ears on the suffering of a defenceless woman, lingered a little
too long around the burning cottage of Stephania Ychas. Not one
escaped.
Stephania Ychas did not lose her life after all. The brave Cossacks
broke in the already half-consumed window and dragged her forth.

She was badly burnt, but lived to tell this tale to a nurse in a Russian
hospital, whither the railway officials of Shavli transported her,
almost immediately after her rescue, in one of their motor-cars.

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Language In The Mind An Introduction To Guillaumes Theory Walter Hirtle

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