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Generative ideas in Port Royal Grammar

Svetoslav Marinov

1 Port Royal grammarians

The following ideas of the Port Royal grammarians are reflected in the XX-century generative/universal grammar as initiated by Chomsky (1957, 1965).

The fundamental feature of the Port-Royal view of language is the concept of operations in our minds in terms of ”conception”, ”judgement” and ”reasoning”.The basic linguistic form is a sentence, called ”proposition” (Graffi, 2001).

• Attempt to reveal the unity of grammar underlying the separate grammarsof different languages (Robins, 1997); to identify the unversal principlesunderlying the art of speaking (Harris and Taylor, 1989).

• The universalist foundation was human reason and thought (Robins, 1997)

• Language provides fininte means but infinite possibilities of expession con-strained only by rules of concept formation and sentence formation (Chom-sky, 1966).

• A sentence has an inner mental aspect and an outer physical aspect as asound sequence (Chomsky, 1966)

• Chomsky (1966) finds examples, like the treatment of explicative and re-stricted relative clauses by the Port Royal grammarians, to support theidea of deep structure and principles that relate it to surface organizationof the sentence.

• Deep structure consists of a system of propositions, organized in variousways, where an elementary proposition in deep structure is of the subject-predicate form (Chomsky, 1966).

• Adverbs are analysed as elliptical forms of preposition-noun constructions;

verbs are analysed as implicitly containing an underlying copula that ex-presses affirmation.

2 Generative Grammar

The use of the term ‘Generative Grammar’ has become quite vague in recentyears and nowadays comprises any Chomsky-derived linguistic approach to nat-ural language. Initially, ‘generative’ meant that the description of the languageis rigorous and explict  in the sense that ”... it is sufficiently explicit to deter-mine how sentences of the language are in fact characterized by the grammar”(Chomsky, 1980).

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One of the underlying characteristics of Generative Grammar is the view

that human beings possess an innate ”language faculty”. The faculty of languageallows children to acquire the moder tongue relatively quickly and easily. In thisview of grammar, there exist also universal principles common to all languagesand specific parameters which differ across languages.

The notions of Deep (or D-) and Surface (or S-) structures are also centralto transformational generative grammar. The central idea is the generation of D-structure of a sentence by phrase-structure rules and subsequently changingit to an S-structure by some transformations. However, in the current works of Chomsky, e.g. Chomsky (1995), the D- and S-structures do no longer exist.

Chomsky (1966) ‘translates’/formalizes the ideas of the Port-Royal gram-marians in terms of his Transformational Generative Grammar view. ”The basesystem consists of rules that generate the underlying grammatical relations withabstract order (the rewrite rules of a phrase-structure grammar); the transfor-

mational system consists of rules of deletion, rearrangement, adjunction, andso on.” (p. 42). Chomsky also states that the Port Royal grammarians are thefirst to develop the notion of phrase structures and to discuss the inadequacyof phrase-structure description of language, and to propose transformations.

Phrase-structure rules and Context-Free Grammars are now widely used inparsing natural languages. Transformations, however, have not been adoptedfor dealing with natural language syntax in computational linguistics. It is stillworth mentioning the work of Stabler (1997) inter alia for syntactic recognitionand parsing in the Minimalist Program framework (Chomsky, 1995).

References

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax . MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics: a Chapter in the History of 

Rationalistic Thought . New York/London: Harper & Row.

Chomsky, Noam. 1980. Rules and Representations . Blackwell.

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program . MIT Press.

Graffi, Giorgio. 2001. 200 Years of Syntax: A critical survey . John Benjamins.

Harris, Roy, and Talbot J. Taylor. 1989. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The

Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure . Routledge.

Robins, R. H. 1997. A Short History of Linguistics . Addison Wesley LongmanLimited.

Stabler, Edward. 1997. Derivational minimalism. In Logical aspects of compu-

tational linguistics, ed. Christian Retore, 68–95. Springer.

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