The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire 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 and
philosophy of language
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...
. Published in 1660 by
Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld (6 February 16128 August 1694) was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contem ...
and
Claude Lancelot
Claude Lancelot (c. 1615 – 1695) was a French Jansenist monk and grammarian.
Lancelot was born in Paris. He participated in the creation of the Petites écoles de Port-Royal in May 1638 (then under the spiritual guidance of Jean Duvergier de H ...
, it was the linguistic counterpart to the ''
Port-Royal Logic
''Port-Royal Logic'', or ''Logique de Port-Royal'', is the common name of ''La logique, ou l'art de penser'', an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, two prominent members of the Jan ...
'' (1662), both named after the
Jansenist
Jansenism was an early modern theological movement within Catholicism, primarily active in the Kingdom of France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. It was declared a heresy by th ...
monastery of
Port-Royal-des-Champs
Port-Royal-des-Champs was an abbey of Cistercian nuns in Magny-les-Hameaux, in the Vallée de Chevreuse southwest of Paris that launched a number of culturally important institutions.
History
The abbey was established in 1204, but became fa ...
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.
In the twentieth century, scholars including
Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
and
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
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 the
Modistae
The Modistae (Latin for Modists), also known as the speculative grammarians, were the members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism or speculative grammar, active in northern France, Germany, England, and Denmark in the 13th and 14t ...
Grammar of
Thomas of Erfurt
The Modistae (Latin for Modists), also known as the speculative grammarians, were the members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism or speculative grammar, active in northern Kingdom of France, France, Holy Roman Empire, Germany, Ki ...
, and later grammars and textbooks authored by scholars including
Julius Caesar Scaliger
Julius Caesar Scaliger (; April 23, 1484 – October 21, 1558), or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism ...
,
Sanctius,
Petrus Ramus
Petrus Ramus (french: Pierre de La Ramée; Anglicized as Peter Ramus ; 1515 – 26 August 1572) was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Early life ...
and
Claude Favre de Vaugelas
Claude Favre de Vaugelas (6 January 1585 – 26 February 1650) was a Savoyard grammarian and man of letters. Although a lifelong courtier, Claude Favre was widely known by the name of one of the landed estates he owned as ''seigneur'' of Vau ...
, Other influences include
Andreas Helwig
Andreas Helwig (Helwich, Helvigius) (1572–1643) was a German classical scholar and linguist. His ''Origenes dictionum germanicarum'' (1622) was a pioneer etymological work of the German language.
Life
Helwig was rector of the University of Berli ...
's
etymology
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...
,
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
's universal language project, and works by philosophers including
René Descartes
René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathem ...
, and
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal ( , , ; ; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic Church, Catholic writer.
He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pa ...
.
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 of
predication. The notion is that all thought structures are based on logic and refrain from outside judgment. 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. This idea was elaborated by Husserl in his treatise of universal grammar in 1920. He published the first formulation of
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
, which he based on "pure logic".
Husserl's aim was to provide a counter-argument to
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and ...
, who advocated a
psychologistic and
evolutionary
Evolution is change in the heredity, heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the Gene expression, expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to ...
view of language and logic.
David Hilbert
David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...
and
Rudolph Carnap further developed Husserl's model, leading to the creation of
Categorial Grammar
Categorial grammar is a family of formalisms in natural language syntax that share the central assumption that syntactic constituents combine as functions and arguments. Categorial grammar posits a close relationship between the syntax and semant ...
in the 1930s through 1950s. More lately,
phenomenologists
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
criticized it for using
simple predicates instead of modern
complex ones.
Rational grammar and biology
The Port-Royal Grammar has been the subject of debates relating to the
demarcation problem
In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience, and other products of human activity, like art an ...
between
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...
and
natural science
Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...
s for centuries. Arnauld and Lancelot's 1803 French editor M (Claude-Bernard) Petitot explains that in the tradition of rational grammar, language is seen as a man-made
invention
An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an i ...
.
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 humanistic tradition was based on the stipulation that
theological
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the ...
speculations could be left out of
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
and
cultural
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the ...
studies. Petitot disputes
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolu ...
's (1712–1778) claim of innate language as not representing rationalism. Petitot argues that in order for language to have arisen rationally, it must have been created by means of human
reasoning
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, lang ...
.
Chomsky considers The Port-Royal Grammar as evidence for his innate concept of language in his 1966 book
Cartesian Linguistics
The term Cartesian linguistics was coined by Noam Chomsky in his book ''Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought'' (1966). The adjective "Cartesian" pertains to René Descartes, a prominent 17th-century philosopher. A ...
, associating the idea to Descartes. Chomsky's claim became soon disputed by historians of linguistics including
Hans Aarsleff
Hans Christian Aarsleff (born 19 July 1925) is a Danish linguist and academic, who has served as emeritus professor of English at Princeton University since 1997. Aarsleff is a renowned specialist in the history of linguistics, the history of ide ...
,
Robin Lakoff
Robin Tolmach Lakoff (; born November 27, 1942) is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book ''Language and Woman's Place'' is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in ling ...
, and
E. F. K. Koerner
Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner (5 February 1939 – 6 January 2022) was a German author, researcher, professor of linguistics, and historian of linguistics.
Early life and education
Koerner was born on the family manor in Mlewiec, near Toruń, ...
among others. 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 sentence ''Invisible 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 as
compositional
In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. ...
being built up of logical propositions.
Chomsky, in contrast, was looking for a historical precursor of his concept of
deep structure versus surface structure. For example, the surface structure ''John and Mary are fishing'' is derived via a transformation from the purportedly not semantic but biological deep grammar structure ''John is fishing and'' ''Mary is fishing''. However, historians have argued that it is not what Arnauld and Lancelot meant.
Nonetheless, based on his observations and Descartes's concept of
innate ideas
Innatism is a philosophical and epistemological doctrine that the mind is born with ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. Therefore, the mind is not a ''tabula rasa'' (blank slate) at birth, which contrasts with the views of early empiricists such as J ...
, Chomsky eventually reached the conclusion that
universal grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
is an innate brain structure which stems from a
genetic mutation
In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mitos ...
in humans, reinterpreting rational grammar and thus linguistics as a
biological
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary in ...
enterprise. In his conception,
dependency structures cannot be learned using reasoning, but are
acquired by the child from a hypothesized
language organ
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is ...
.
This natural conclusion of universal grammar is one Chomsky claims to be innately human, based on the notion that language is a by product of the soul. His accompanying argument for animals and their speech patterns is that they have no solid universal language and thus have no soul.
References
{{Reflist
Editions and translations
* Antoine Arnauld & Claude Lancelot, ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée, ou La Grammaire de Port-Royal'', présentée par Herbert E. Brekle, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1966.
* Antoine Arnauld & Claude Lancelot, ''General and Rational Grammar: The Port-Royal Grammar'', translated by Jacques Rieux and Bernard E. Rollin, The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Bibliography
* Maria Tsiapera & Garon Wheeler, ''The Port-Royal Grammar: Sources and Influences'', Münster: Nodus, 1993.
* Vivian Salmon, ''Cartesian Linguistics'' in ''The Study of Language in 17th Century England'', Benjamins, 1988.
* Camiel Hamans & Pieter A.M. Seuren, ''Chomsky in search of a pedigree'' in ''Chomskyan (R)evolutions''. Edited by Douglas A. Kibbee. Benjamins, 2010.
External links
Antoine Arnauldby J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson
Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal par Arnauld et Lancelot; reécédée d'un Essai sur l'origine et les progrès de la langue françoise par M. Petitot, et suivie du Commentaire de M. Duclos
1660 books
Philosophy of language literature
Linguistics books
Grammar books