Creative aspect of language use

Within the framework of Cartesian linguistics, a descriptive grammar is con- cerned with both sound and meaning; in our terminology, it assigns to each sentence an abstract deep structure determining its semantic content and a surface structure determining its phonetic form. A complete grammar, then, would consist of a finite system of rules generating this infinite set of paired structures and thus showing how the speaker-hearer can make infinite use of finite means in expressing his “mental acts” and “mental states.” However, Cartesian linguistics was not concerned simply with descriptive grammar, in this sense, but rather with “grammaire générale,” that is, with the universal principles of language structure. At the very outset of the work under review, a distinction was made between general and particular grammar. These are characterized by Du Marsais in the following way: Some points [observations] of grammar apply to all languages. These form what we call general grammar – for example, those we made regarding articulated sounds and the letters which are the signs of these sounds, the nature of words and the various ways they must be ordered or terminated in order to have meaning. Apart from these general points, there are some which are peculiar to one particular language, and these form the special grammar of that language.95 Beauzée elaborates the distinction in the following way: Grammar, whose object is the expression of thought with the help of spoken or written words, comprises two sorts of principles. One sort, being immutably true and universally applicable, derive from the nature of thought itself, following its analysis and being its result. The other sort are only hypothetically true and depend on conventions which, being accidental, arbitrary and changeable, have given rise to different idioms. The first sort of principles constitute general grammar and the second are the object of various particular grammars. General grammar is therefore the rational science of the immutable and general principles of spoken or written Language [Langage], whatever language [langue] this may be. A particular grammar is the art of applying the arbitrary and usual conventions of a particular language to the immutable and general conventions of written or spoken Language.

General Grammar is a science, because its object is rational speculation on the immutable and general principles of Language. A particular Grammar is an art, because it considers the practical application of the arbitrary and usual conventions of a particular language to the general principles of Language. The science of grammar is anterior to all languages in so far as its principles presuppose only the possibility of languages and are the same as those which guide human reason in its intellectual operations; in short, because they are eternally true. The art of grammar, by contrast, is posterior to languages in so far as linguistic usages must exist before they can stand in an artificial relation to the general principles of Language, and the analogical systems that form this art can be determined only by observations made on these pre-existent usages.96 In his Eloge de du Marsais, D’Alembert gives this account of “philosophical grammar”: Grammar is therefore the work of philosophers. Only a philosophical mind can ascend to the principles on which its rules are based … This mind first recognizes, in the grammar of each language, the general principles which are common to all of them, and which form General Grammar. It then distinguishes, among the usages peculiar to each language, those which can be founded on reason from those which are the work of chance or negligence: it observes the reciprocal influences that languages have had on each other and the alterations that this mingling has brought about without entirely destroying their individual character; it weighs their mutual advantages and disadvan- tages; differences in their construction …; the diversity of their genius …; their richness and freedom, poverty and servitude. The development of these various factors is the true metaphysics of grammar. Its object … is to advance the human mind in the generation of its ideas and in the use it makes of words to transmit thoughts to other men.97 The discovery of universal principles would provide a partial explanation for the facts of particular languages, in so far as these could be shown to be simply specific instances of the general features of language structure formulated in the “grammaire générale.” Beyond this, the universal features themselves might be explained on the basis of general assumptions about human mental processes or the contingencies of language use (for example, the utility of elliptical trans- formations). Proceeding in this way, Cartesian linguistics attempts to develop a theory of grammar that is not only “general” but also “explanatory” [raisonnée]. The linguistics of Port-Royal and its successors developed in part in reaction against the prevailing approaches represented, for example, in such work as Vaugelas’s Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647).98 Vaugelas’s goal is simply to describe usage “which everyone recognizes as the master and ruler of living languages” (Preface). His book is called Remarques … rather than Décisions … or Loix … because he is “a simple observer [tesmoin].” He disclaims any intention of explaining the facts of speech or finding general principles that underlie them, just as he generally suggests no modification or “purification” of usage on rational or esthetic grounds. His grammar, then, is

neither “explanatory” nor prescriptive.99 He is quite aware of the problems of determining actual usage and provides an interesting discussion of “elicitation procedures” (pp. 503f.), in which, among other things, he points out the inadequacy of the kinds of “direct question” tests for grammaticalness that have occasionally been proposed and applied by structural linguists, with predictably inconclusive results. He does not restrict his descriptive comments to surface structure.100 For example, he points out that one cannot determine from the form of a word whether it has an “active meaning” [signification] or a “passive meaning” or, ambiguously, both (pp. 562–563). Thus in the sentence “My esteem isn’t something from which you can derive any great advantage,” the phrase “my esteem” has the sense “the esteem which I hold for you,” whereas in the sentence “My esteem does not depend on you,” it means “the esteem in which I am held” or “the esteem in which I may be held;” and the same is true of such words as “aid,” “help,” and “opinion.” There are other examples of a concern for descriptive adequacy on a broad scale. At the same time, Vaugelas’s work foreshadows many of the defects of modern linguistic theory, for example, in his failure to recognize the creative aspect of language use. Thus he regards normal language use as constructed of phrases and sentences that are “authorized by usage,” although new words (e.g., brusqueté, pleurement) can be correctly formed by analogy (pp. 568f). His view of language structure, in this respect, seems not very different from that of Saussure, Jespersen, Bloomfield, and many others who regard innovation as possible only “by analogy,” by substitution of lexical items for items of the same category within fixed frames (cf. p. 65 above). The reaction of “philosophical grammar” is not against the descriptivism of Vaugelas and others as such101 but against the restriction to pure descriptivism. The Port-Royal Grammar takes it as a general maxim for anyone working on a living language that “the ways of speaking that are authorised by undisputed general usage must be accepted as good even if they go against the rules and analogy of the language” (p. 83; PRG 113). Lamy, in his rhetoric, echoes Vaugelas in describing usage as “the master and arbitrary ruler of languages” and in holding that “no one may contest this rule which necessity has estab- lished and the general agreement of people has confirmed” (op. cit., p. 31). Du Marsais insists that “the philosophical grammarian must consider the particular language he is studying in relation to what this language is in itself and not in relation to another language.”102 Philosophical grammar, then, was not charac- teristically attempting to refine or improve language, but to discover its under- lying principles and to explain the particular phenomena that are observed.103 The example which, for more than a century, was used to illustrate this difference between descriptive and explanatory grammar was provided by a rule of Vaugelas (pp. 385f.) regarding relative clauses, namely, the rule that a relative clause may not be added to a noun that has no articles or only the “article

indefini” de. Thus one cannot say “II a fait cela par avarice, qui est capable de tout” or “II a fait cela par avarice, dont la soif ne se peut esteindre.” Similarly, one cannot say “II a esté blessé d’un coup de fleche, qui estoit empoisonnée” (p. 385), although it is correct to say “II a esté blessé de la fleche, qui estoit empoisonnée” or “II a esté blessé d’une fleche qui estoit empoisonnée.” In Chapter IX, the Port-Royal Grammar first notes a variety of exceptions to this rule and then proposes a general explanatory principle to account both for the examples that fall under the rule of Vaugelas and for the exceptions to his rule.104 The explanation is, once again, based on the distinction between mean- ing and reference. In the case of a “common noun,” the meaning [signification] is fixed (except for ambiguity or metaphor), but the reference [estendue] varies, depending on the noun phrase in which the noun appears. A particular occur- rence of a noun is called indeterminate “when there is nothing that indicates whether it must be taken generally or particularly and, if the latter, whether for a determinate or indeterminate particular” (p. 77; PRG 109); otherwise, it is determinate. Vaugelas’s rule is now restated in terms of determination: “in current French usage one may not put qui after a common noun unless it is determined by an article or some other thing that determines it no less than it would be determined by an article” (p. 77; PRG 109). A detailed analysis follows, attempting to show that the apparent counter-examples involve occur- rences of nouns that are “determined” by some feature other than the article. In part, the analysis is based on assumptions about deep structure that are not without interest in themselves. The rule is also discussed by Du Marsais, Beauzée, and others at some length. We need not go into the details here. The point, in the present context, is that this was taken as a paradigm example of the necessity for supplementing descriptive statements with a rational explanation, if linguistics was to go beyond compilation of facts to true “science” – in the terminology of the day, if grammar was to become “philosophical.” In connection with the rule of Vaugelas and several other cases, the expla- nations that are proposed, in universal grammar, have some substance and linguis- tic content. All too often, however, they are quite empty, and invoke assumptions about underlying mental reality in a quite mechanical and unrevealing way. In fact, it seems to me that in general the modern critique of “philosophical gram- mar” is quite misplaced. The error of this position is generally taken to be its excessive rationality and a priorism and its disregard for linguistic fact. But a more cogent criticism is that the tradition of philosophical grammar is too limited to mere description of fact – that it is insufficiently “raisonnée”; that is, it seems to me that the faults (or limitations) of this work are just the opposite of those which have been attributed to it by modern critics. The philosophical grammarians considered a wide realm of particular examples; they tried to show, for each example, what was the deep structure that underlies its surface form and expresses the relations among elements that determine its meaning. To this extent, their

work is purely descriptive (just as modern linguistics is purely descriptive in pursuit of its more restricted goal of identifying the units that constitute the surface structure of particular utterances, their arrangement into phrases, and their formally marked relations). Reading this work, one is constantly struck by the ad hoc character of the analysis, even where it seems factually correct. A deep structure is proposed that does convey the semantic content, but the basis for its selection (beyond mere factual correctness) is generally unformulated. What is missing is a theory of linguistic structure that is articulated with sufficient precision and is sufficiently rich to bear the burden of justification. Although the examples of deep structure that are given in abundance often seem quite plausible, they are unsatisfying, just as modern linguistic descriptions, though often quite plausible in their analysis of particular utterances into phonemes, morphemes, words, and phrases, remain unsatisfying, and for the same reason. In neither case do we have an underlying hypothesis as to the general nature of language that is sufficiently strong as to indicate why just these and not other descriptions are selected by the child acquiring the language or the linguist describing it, on the basis of the data available to them.105 What is more, there is little recognition in philosophical grammar of the intricacy of the mechanisms that relate deep to surface structure, and, beyond the general outlines sketched above, there is no detailed investigation of the character of the rules that appear in grammars or the formal conditions that they satisfy. Concomitantly, no clear distinction is made between the abstract structure underlying a sentence and the sentence itself. It is, by and large, assumed that the deep structure consists of actual sentences in a simpler or more natural organ- ization and that the rules of inversion, ellipsis, and so on, that form the full range of actual sentences simply operate on these already formed simple sentences. This point of view is explicit, for example, in Du Marsais’s theory of construction and syntax, and it is undoubtedly the general view throughout.106 The totally unwar- ranted assumption that a deep structure is nothing other than an arrangement of simple sentences can be traced to the Cartesian postulate that, quite generally, the principles that determine the nature of thought and perception must be accessible to introspection and can be brought to consciousness, with care and attention. Despite these shortcomings, the insights into the organization of grammar that were achieved in Cartesian linguistics remain quite impressive, and a careful study of this work can hardly fail to prove rewarding to a linguist who approaches it without prejudice or preconceptions as to the a priori limitations on permitted linguistic investigation. Beyond these achievements, the universal grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have made a contribution of lasting value by the very fact that they posed so clearly the problem of changing the orientation of linguistics from “natural history” to “natural philosophy” and by stressing the importance of the search for universal principles and for rational explanation of linguistic fact, if progress is to be made toward this goal.