General Grammar. The chief result of the Renais
sance was not, strictly speaking, to give the moderns
access to the civilization of the ancients. It was, above
all, to make them realize how far the human spirit
might reach. The moderns began to emulate the an-
cients, and then tried to surpass them. In the seven-
teenth century it was clear to most that that goal had
been reached. Not because the moderns were better
men, but because, as Francis Bacon and others put it,
they were standing on the shoulders of their prede-
cessors. Anyhow, an era that produced philosophers
like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton did not have to
feel inferior to any that had come before. The achieve-
ment of these thinkers was their own, and not merely
an explication of the work of the ancients.
The Grammaire générale et raisonnée of the Port-
Royal School in Paris, written by Antoine Arnauld and
Claude Launcelot (1660), is a product of the same
independent spirit. The avowed object of the book is
to set forth what is common to all languages. It was
based on a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, Romance languages, and German. This in itself
was new. Few previous grammarians had had such a
wide empirical base to work from. But even more
remarkable is the thoroughly independent approach to
the subject. The authors set out to explain language
by reference to the constitution of the human mind.
For the first time we meet with grammarians who draw
the proper linguistic consequences of Aristotle's insight
that though the words vary, the thoughts that they
stand for are common to all. The human mind is said
to have three fundamental operations: conceive, judge,
and reason. As reasoning consists in the comparison
of judgments, the first two operations are fundamental.
People “speak in order to express judgments, and the
judgments are made about things that they conceive.”
A judgment is normally expressed by means of a prop-
osition, and a proposition, such as “the earth is round,”
had two fundamental terms, the subject (the earth) and
the attribute (round). Moreover, there is the link or
copula (is) which predicates or “affirms” the attribute
of the subject.
There is little here that Aristotle had not said before.
But Aristotle never developed these ideas in linguistic
terms. Nor had the medieval Schoolmen done so. The
grammatica speculativa of the Modistae consisted es-
sentially in a superficial harmonizing of Priscianus and
Aristotle.
The distinction between conceiving and judging is
essential for defining the verb, whose function, accord-
ing to the Port-Royal grammarians, is to affirm. It is
not, as all previous authorities had said, to mark time.
Tense is accidental, not essential to the verb. A lan-
guage need only contain a single verb, namely, the verb
is. All other verbs can be analyzed as containing is,
as a mark of affirmation, and in addition some attribute,
of whatever kind.
He runs is as much as to say
he is
running.
Thus the Port-Royal grammarians based their lin-
guistic analysis squarely on sentence constituency. All
of their predecessors had tried to progress in the other
direction, by trying to build up the whole of their
syntax on the system of parts of speech. The Port-Royal
grammarians' approach was a new departure, and it
was to influence subsequent grammatical thinking in
many important respects.
