ThePort-Royal Grammar (originallyGrammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle, "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaking, explained in a clear and natural manner") was a milestone in the analysis andphilosophy of language. Published in 1660 byAntoine Arnauld andClaude Lancelot, it was the linguistic counterpart to thePort-Royal Logic (1662), both named after theJansenist monastery ofPort-Royal-des-Champs where their authors worked. The Port-Royal Grammar became used as a standard textbook in the study of language until the early nineteenth century, and it has been reproduced in several editions and translations.[1] In the twentieth century, scholars includingEdmund Husserl andNoam Chomsky maintained academic interest in the book.
Arnauld and Lancelot's approach to language is historical, comparative, and philosophical. Discussing the essence of French, they give examples from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and German. Their work is influenced by theModistae Grammar ofThomas of Erfurt, and later grammars and textbooks authored by scholars includingJulius Caesar Scaliger,Sanctius,Petrus Ramus andClaude Favre de Vaugelas, Other influences includeAndreas Helwig'setymology,Francis Bacon's universal language project, and works by philosophers includingRené Descartes, andBlaise Pascal.[1]
A core argument of Arnauld and Lancelot's general and rational grammar is that language reveals human thought structures which are based on the logic ofpredication. The notion is that all thought structures are based on logic and refrain from outside judgment.[2] All languages are similar because there is only one logic. Their connection between logic and grammar has much to with the idea of the vocabulary concluding the logic of a statement, that arguments within arguments lead to an unsaid logical deduction.[3]
This idea was elaborated byEdmund Husserl in his treatise of universal grammar in 1920. He published the first formulation ofgenerative grammar, which he based on "pure logic".[4] Husserl's aim was to provide a counter-argument to apsychologistic view of language and logic.[5]David Hilbert andRudolph Carnap further developed Husserl's model, leading to the creation ofCategorial Grammar in the 1930s through 1950s. More lately,phenomenologists criticized it for usingsimple predicates instead of moderncomplex ones.[6]
The Port-Royal Grammar has been the subject of debates relating to thedemarcation problem betweenhumanities andnatural sciences for centuries. In the tradition of rational grammar, language is seen as a man-madeinvention.Age of Reason philosophers thought that God created Man social and rational, and these two natural characteristics gave rise to his need to construct a language to communicate his thoughts to others. Thus, the arising view was based on the stipulation that speculations referring to theCreation could be left out ofsocial andcultural analysis.[7]
Noam Chomsky considers The Port-Royal Grammar as evidence for his innate concept of language in his 1966 bookCartesian Linguistics, associating the idea to Descartes. Chomsky's claim became soon disputed by historians of linguistics includingHans Aarsleff,Robin Lakoff,E. F. K. Koerner, and Vivian Salmon. While Descartes is more famous than Arnauld and Lancelot, he wrote little about language and was not involved in the making of Port-Royal Grammar. The dispute also concerns Arnauld and Lancelot's analysis of their example sentenceInvisible God created the visible world. In a classical view, the sentence is composed of the three unary predicates 'God is invisible', 'he created the world', and 'the world is visible'. In other words, Arnauld and Lancelot, and their later interpreters including Husserl, considered semantics and thought ascompositional and being built up of logical propositions.[8][9]
Chomsky, in contrast, was looking for a historical precursor of his concept ofdeep structure versus surface structure. For example, the surface structureJohn and Mary are fishing is derived via a transformation from the purportedly not semantic but biological deep grammar structureJohn is fishing andMary is fishing. However, historians have argued that it is not what Arnauld and Lancelot meant.[10] Nonetheless, based on his observations and Descartes's concept ofinnate ideas, Chomsky eventually explained thatuniversal grammar is an innate brain structure which stems from agenetic mutation in humans, thus reinterpreting linguistics as abiological enterprise. In his conception,dependency structures cannot be learned using reasoning, but areacquired by the child from a hypothesizedlanguage organ.[11] The Port-Royal Grammar does not argue that people are born rational in the sense that they possess an innate rational grammar. Rather, it contends that grammatical phenomena were "invented" so that people could express their mental experiences.