 This in turn led him to examine languages where words are not formed in this way and in his last years to suggest the bases for a general theory of the word, or as he used to say, the vocable, to avoid the danger of foisting the Indo-European type of word onto languages of a very different type.Throughout his teaching career, from 1938 to 1960 at the École pratique des hautes 
études, Guillaume wrote out his lectures, usually given twice a week.These, along with various research notes and essays, make up some 60,000 manuscript pages kept in the Fonds 
Gustave Guillaume at Laval University in Quebec City.