The General and Rational Grammar (Grammaire générale et raisonnée) is a small book, about 200 pages, published anonymously in Paris in 1660. Two men wrote it. Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a theologian and logician at the centre of Jansenism, known as “the Great Arnauld (le Grand Arnauld).” Claude Lancelot (c. 1615–1695) was the grammar teacher at the “Little Schools (Petites Écoles)” run by the convent of Port-Royal, and the author of the New Method (Nouvelle Méthode) books, a groundbreaking way of learning Latin, Greek, Italian and Spanish. The received view is that the linguistic material is Lancelot’s and the philosophical frame Arnauld’s — but the division of hands is still debated.
The book has a companion. Two years later came the Logic, or the Art of Thinking (La Logique ou l’art de penser), by Arnauld and Pierre Nicole (1662, the “Port-Royal Logic”). The Grammar and the Logic are a pair: post-Cartesian rationalism gathered into one project, taken from the side of language and the side of thought. That is why the book is usually called the “Port-Royal Grammar.”
1. “Grammar is the art of speaking” — the project
The text begins with this sentence.
La Grammaire est l’art de parler. Parler, est expliquer ses pensées par des signes que les hommes ont inventés à ce dessein.
Grammar is the art of speaking. To speak is to explain one’s thoughts by signs that men invented for this purpose. (French quotations throughout; Japanese and English are L/LAB working translations.)
A sign has two sides — “its nature, as sound and character,” and “its work, to signify thought.” The first is treated in Part I (sounds and letters, six chapters); the second in Part II (“on the principles and reasons on which the diverse forms of the signification of words rest,” twenty-four chapters).
The two words of the title state the project. “General (générale)” — not tied to one language. Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French are set side by side, and the shared mechanism beneath their differences is sought. “Rational (raisonnée)” — not “because that is how it is said,” but “why is it said that way.” Not a record of usage but the reasons for usage. The wager is that behind every language there is one grammar.
2. Before grammar, there is the mind
In the first chapter of Part II the authors step away from grammar and talk about the mind. “To understand the various significations enclosed in words, one must first understand what passes in our thought, since words were invented only to make it known.”
The philosophers’ three operations of the mind are conceiving (concevoir), judging (juger), reasoning (raisonner). Reasoning makes a third judgment out of two, and is only an extension of judging. So grammar needs the first two — or rather, the conceiving contained within the judging.
Juger, c’est affirmer qu’une chose que nous concevons est telle, ou n’est pas telle.
To judge is to affirm that a thing we conceive is thus, or is not thus.
A judgment put into words is a proposition. And a proposition always has three elements.
toute proposition enferme nécessairement deux termes ; l’un appelé sujet, qui est ce dont on affirme, comme terre ; et l’autre appelé attribut, qui est ce qu’on affirme, comme ronde : et de plus la liaison entre ces deux termes, est.
Every proposition necessarily contains two terms — one called the subject, that of which one affirms, as “earth”; the other called the attribute, that which one affirms, as “round” — and, moreover, the link between these two terms: “is”.
The two terms (subject, attribute) belong to the first operation (conceiving): they are what we picture, the objects of thought. The link “is” belongs to the second operation (judging): it is “the very act of our mind, and the manner in which we think.” From here the authors draw the greatest distinction in what passes in the mind — the “object of thought,” and the “form and manner of thought, of which the chief is judgment.”
3. The most general division of words
If the mind divides into “object” and “form,” then the words that copy it should divide along the same line.
il faut aussi que la plus générale distinction des mots soit que les uns signifient les objets des pensées, et les autres la forme et la manière de nos pensées.
The most general distinction of words must likewise be that some signify the objects of thought, and others the form and manner of our thought.
Words that signify objects — noun, article, pronoun, participle, preposition, adverb. Words that signify form — verb, conjunction, interjection. The noun then splits, following substance (what subsists on its own) and accident (what exists only through a substance), into substantive and adjective. But the authors weigh “the manner of signifying (manière de signifier)” as much as the signification, and keep adjusting — “whiteness,” for instance, names an accident yet behaves like a substantive.
The character of the “form” words shows clearly in the negative particle. “There is no object in the world outside our mind that answers to the particle non. It marks nothing but the judgment we make that one thing is not another.” Conjunctions and interjections are the same: signs that stamp a movement of the mind itself — joining, separating, denying, conditioning, wishing, wondering.
4. Two high points — the verb, and the hidden sentence
The essence of the verb is affirmation
Part II, chapter 13. The authors redefine the verb for the first time in centuries.
le verbe, un mot dont le principal usage est de signifier l’affirmation … de marquer que le discours où ce mot est employé, est le discours d’un homme qui ne conçoit pas seulement les choses, mais qui en juge et qui les affirme.
the verb — a word whose principal use is to signify affirmation … to mark that the discourse in which the word is used is the discourse of someone who does not merely conceive things, but judges and affirms them.
In its pure form this is the role of the copula être (“is”) alone. Every other verb packs extra things into the affirmation — an attribute (“lives” = “is living”), a subject (the person ending, the -s of je vois), a time (tense). So “Peter lives” and “Peter is living” say the same thing.
The authors dismiss the famous earlier definitions together. Aristotle above all — “the verb is a word signifying with time (vox significans cum tempore)” (the De Interpretatione) — mistook for the essence a feature (“time”) that is only incidental to the verb. At the core of the verb is not time but the judgment the speaker passes on the world.
“God invisible created the world visible”
Part II, chapter 9. In the analysis of the relative pronoun (qui) comes the most-quoted passage in the book.
Dieu invisible a créé le monde visible : il se passe trois jugemens dans mon esprit … Dieu est invisible. 2. Qu’il a créé le monde. 3. Que le monde est visible.
God invisible created the world visible: three judgments take place in my mind … God is invisible. 2. That he created the world. 3. That the world is visible.
Of the three, the middle — “God created the world” — is the principal proposition, and the outer two are incident propositions (proposition incidente). The incident propositions dissolve into the subject and attribute of the principal one. And —
Or ces propositions incidentes sont souvent dans notre esprit, sans être exprimées par des paroles.
Now these incident propositions are often in our mind without being expressed in words.
The relative pronoun qui is the tool that brings the hidden sentence out — open “God invisible…” into “God, who is invisible, …” and the embedded judgment appears. One spoken sentence, and several judgments moving beneath it. This two-layer distinction is revived 300 years later as “deep structure / surface structure.”
5. Syntax, and Part I (sounds, letters, reading)
Part I (chapters 1–6) is phonetics and orthography. Vowels are sounds made by the opening of the mouth alone; consonants do not make a complete sound on their own and need to combine with a vowel — a classification by articulation. To correct the gap between spelling and sound, the authors propose “a new way of learning to read easily in all sorts of languages” (chapter 6): teach from the sound-value, not the letter-name — an anticipation of phonics.
And syntax (the last chapter of Part II) is strikingly short. “Following the principles we have established, it will not be hard to give general notions of it.” The construction of words is of two kinds — agreement (convenance) (words fitting together) and government (régime) (one causing a change in the other). And agreement “is, for the most part, the same in all languages, because it is a natural consequence.” Even the skeleton of syntax is claimed to be universal.
In sum
| Question | The answer in the General and Rational Grammar |
|---|---|
| What is grammar? | The art of speaking. To speak is to explain thought by signs — so grammar copies the structure of the mind |
| What “general” and “rational” mean | Not bound to one language; asks not usage but its reason (raison) |
| The foundation of grammar | The mind’s three operations (conceive, judge, reason). A judgment = a proposition = subject + attribute + the copula “is” |
| The most general division of words | Words for the objects of thought (nouns, etc.) / words for the form of thought (verb, conjunction, interjection) |
| The essence of the verb | To signify affirmation. Aristotle’s “word signifying with time” misses it |
| The relative pronoun | A device that folds several judgments (incident propositions) into one sentence |
| Syntax | Agreement and government. Agreement is “a natural consequence,” so it is the same in every language |
Why it is still read
- The starting point of a whole movement — in eighteenth-century France, Du Marsais, Beauzée and Condillac went on writing “grammaire générale,” and the grammar articles of the Encyclopédie followed the line. Lancelot’s New Method shaped European language teaching for 150 years.
- The nineteenth-century reaction — historical and comparative linguistics, from Bopp and Grimm to the Neogrammarians, dismissed the General Grammar as armchair rationalism from an empirical standpoint. Bréal, and later Bloomfield, rejected “general grammar.”
- The 1966 revival — Noam Chomsky, in Cartesian Linguistics, called Port-Royal an ancestor of generative grammar. The “God invisible…” analysis, he argued, anticipates deep and surface structure, and “the infinite use of finite means (the creative aspect of language use)” can be read here too.
- The counter-reading — the historians Hans Aarsleff and Vivian Salmon take Chomsky’s reading as anachronistic. Port-Royal’s “depth” is not a syntactic transformation but the Aristotelian–Scholastic proposition, and its sources lie less in Descartes than in the medieval speculative grammarians (the modistae) and an Augustinian theory of signs.
- What survives on any reading — the book was the first sustained attempt to ask not “what are the rules of this language?” but “why does language have the shape it has?” — and to answer “because thought has that shape.” That question ties it to Humboldt (language as worldview), to Saussure (langue as a system), and to Chomsky (a universal grammar rooted in the mind).
