Saussure on *téi-stems: a generativist avant la lettre?

This paper highlights one remarkable aspect of Saussure’s account of the Proto-Indo-European *tei-/ti-stems: he used an inherently accented morpheme for his reconstruction, viz. an underlyingly accented *-téi-. Based on an analysis of a neglected passage from the end of the Mémoire, and introducing more explicit statements from his posthumously published courses on morphology and on Gothic, I propose that Saussure devised a budding compositional system of morphophonological analysis. I suggest that his underlyingly accented morphemes indicate two levels of abstraction in phonology, forms before and after modification, a remarkable move that foreshadows similar analyses in generative grammar. I focus on his account of Indo-European *-téy-, which remains valuable in assessing this particularly contentious realm of Indo-European morphology, namely accent and ablaut.