Psychomécanique et lexicologie La question du signifié plénier

One common complaint levelled against Guillaume’s psychomechanics of language – which has been seminal in producing fine-grained grammatical semantics, recognized beyond the circle of Guillaumians – is that it hardly deals with lexical semantics. It is significant in this respect that Guillaume himself in his Leçons is conspicuously silent on the subject and in fact only seldom mentions lexical phenomena. When he does, it is either referring to those elements which go towards the structure of the word (affixes), or phenomena of subduction – in particular esoteric ones, in particular those which may be observed in the way verbs behave with auxiliaries. In spite of this, several linguists have attempted to test the relevance of psychomechanical concepts in lexicology, M.-L. Honeste and J. Picoche in particular. The present article is based on recent work by a young linguist, Bohdana Librova, and takes a fresh look at the subject from the angle of the full signified (signifié plénier).