Professor Emeritus of French
André Malécot (1920–2015) was born in Paris and came to this country as an infant, along with his French mother. After completing his studies for the B.A. at the University of Delaware, he served in the US Navy during WW II. He then earned an M.A. from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He began his academic career at Haverford College, and later taught at UC Riverside (1954–1961) before going to the University of Pennsylvania, where he held the rank of Full Professor. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the Department of French and Italian at UC Santa Barbara.
André’s research primarily focused on experimental acoustic phonetics and structural analysis of the French language. He pioneered the quantitative measurement of articulatory pressure in French consonants and nasalization. Not satisfied with extant data on which the structural analysis of French was based, he also became a pioneer in what is now termed corpus linguistics. In the late 1960s, he surreptitiously recorded a large corpus of natural conversations with the Parisian upper-middle class. The “Paris Corpus” provided the data on which a series of groundbreaking descriptive studies of French phonetics was based. He had the foresight to include a description of linguistic variation among different demographic groups, long before this became standard practice in sociolinguistics.
While at UC Riverside, André researched the indigenous Luiseño language, which resulted in a book entitled Luiseño: A Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: U Penn Press, 1964). Subsequent scholarly books include Introduction à la phonétique française (The Hague: Mouton, 1977) and Contribution à l’étude de la force d’articulation en français (The Hague: Mouton, 1977). In addition, he published over 70 scholarly articles in major journals, including Language.
He was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Paris in 1967–68 and was decorated by the French Minister of Education, being given the rank of officier in the Order of Academic Palms.
In addition to his scholarly research, André cared about applying his findings to the teaching of the French as a second language. This motivated him to establish the French Language Institute at UC Santa Barbara, a graduate program aimed at high school teachers of French that was sponsored by UCSB Summer Sessions for many years.