Pascal, Port-Royal, and Cartesian Linguistics

In a recent book,1 Noam Chomsky has put forth the thesis that there is a whole tradition of linguistic research and theory in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries which linguists in the twentieth century have either ignored or explicitly rejected as useless and even ridiculous. This tradition begins for him with the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic, both enormously influential books, and the tradition continues with such writers as Du Marsais (1676-1756), Beauzee, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), et al. This tradition is shown to have very interesting ideas about underlying grammatical structures different from the surface structure of the sentence, about what distinguishes human speech from animal communication or mechanical speech production, about grammatical explanation, and about the acquisition of language-all of these theories are seen to prefigure (not too astonishingly) the theories of generative or transformational grammar. Chomsky has called his book Linguistics, and it is just the assumption that the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic are which I wish to call into question. Chomsky is, of course, only accepting a long tradition. He cites, for example, Saint-Beuve to the effect that the Port-Royal Grammar represented une branche du cartesianisme que Descartes n'avait pas lui-meme poussee. 2 Yet there is room to doubt this assumption on historical grounds, and even if this label Cartesian is not essential to Chomsky's theorieshe states himself that the aptness of the term is a matter of little interest -nonetheless, historical accuracy has some importance after all in a book which claims to be some sort of contribution to the history of thought. Moreover, an inaccurate generalization in the history of ideas almost always reflects a blurred or inaccurate understanding of the ideas in question. To begin with external evidence: the author of the Port-Royal Grammar8 is generally assumed to be Claude Lancelot (1615-95), the language instructor of the petites ecoles of Port-Royal, author of several grammars of European languages (as well as of the best-selling Jardin des racines grecques), a philologist and pedagogue, but no philosopher and certainly not to be convicted of Cartesianism, except by association.4 Lancelot acknowledges in his preface to the Grammar the great debt he owes to a friend for the ideas in the work; the friend is generally taken to