ABSTRACT
From the point of view of many contemporary linguists, Chapter 6 marks the beginning of time. Chomsky (1966) put late seventeenth-century general grammar on the map in his representation of Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld’s Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée (General and Rational Grammar) (1676/1966) as an early landmark in a tradition of rationalist linguistics. Chomsky considers his own work an independent manifestation of that tradition, which he labels ‘Cartesian’ in reference to the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). Few modern-day generativists or applied linguists seem to have studied Cartesian Linguistics (in which Chomsky explores this thesis most fully), much less the Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée. Nevertheless, Lancelot and Arnauld’s ‘Port-Royal grammar’ – named for the suburb of Paris where it was written – has acquired a reputation as having anticipated generative linguistics.
