Jean Fourquet

French linguist (1899–2001). Author of "La Notion de Verbe," Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 43 (1) (1950): 72–96. The 1950 Fourquet paper is the textual anchor for Merleau-Ponty's critique of naïve linguistic universalism in Le problème de la parole (1953–54). Fourquet reports a debate at the Linguistic Society of Paris on whether the noun-verb distinction, taken for granted in Indo-European linguistic science as a universal feature of all human languages, applies to Chinese — an isolating language that lacks Indo-European inflectional morphology. The debate's instability within Indo-European reference reveals that the universal grammar built upon the noun-verb distinction was never clearly grounded even in its home territory. PbP's reading of Fourquet is what allows MP's propaedeutic dialectic to move from naïve universalism through scientific objectivism toward the integrative recovery.

Key Points

  • The 1950 paper: "La Notion de Verbe," Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 43 (1): 72–96. Fourquet reports the Linguistic Society of Paris debate on Chinese.
  • The Chinese case: a sinologist raised the question whether the noun-verb distinction applies to Chinese. In Indo-European languages, the distinction is morphologically picked out (verbs are conjugated, nouns inflected for number / gender / case). Chinese lacks this inflectional morphology. Two camps emerged:
    • The "no" camp: where word form does not distinguish action-noun from action-verb, there is effectively no way to differentiate the two parts of speech. The distinction therefore does not apply to Chinese.
    • The "yes" camp: even where word forms are identical, the verb can still be differentiated from the noun by its function in the sentence — the verb can serve as the predicate; the noun cannot.
  • What MP draws from the debate: PbP 45–48 (per Kee §1.3, pp. 77–78). The debate's instability shows that neither the morphological criterion nor the functional criterion provides necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying the verb cross-linguistically. The noun-verb distinction, taken for granted as universal across human languages, "had in fact never been clear and consistent even with respect to Indo-European languages." The supposed universal grammar was a sublimation of Indo-European usage, not a finding about language as such.
  • The dialectical role: Fourquet's report is what forces the propaedeutic to move from naïve universalism through to the next stage. Without the radical encounter with a non-Indo-European language, naïve universalism could perpetuate the Indo-European illusion indefinitely. The Chinese case is the empirical lever against the universal-grammar illusion.
  • Continuing relevance: Kee fn 8 records that "for a more recent take arguing against overstating the noun-verb distinction in Chinese, see Shen (2019)." Kee also cites Evans and Levinson (2009) on the broader contemporary skepticism toward language universals, including the noun-verb distinction. The Fourquet-MP critique, developed in 1950 and 1953–54, anticipates a now-established line in contemporary linguistics.

Connections

  • anchors MP's critique of naïve linguistic universalism in the propaedeutic dialectic
  • the empirical lever against universal-grammar / logicist universalisms (Carnap / Vienna School / German metaphysics / Husserl's Fourth-LI)
  • anticipates contemporary linguistic-typological skepticism toward language universals (Evans & Levinson 2009; Tomasello 2009; Mithen 2024 — all cited by Kee)

Sources

  • kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology — §1.3 (Kee pp. 77–78); fn 7 (the bibliographic citation: Fourquet 1950, Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 43 (1): 72–96); fn 8 (the Shen 2019 follow-up). Kee fn 9 records the consequence for analyses of nominal sentences in Slavic languages: if there are languages that construct sentences without verbs (PbP 45), previous Slavic-language analyses (which assumed elided "to be") may need revisiting.