What ‘idea’ is expressed by an adverb?

Port Royal

The Port Royal Grammar (Grammaire generale et raisonn´ee,1660) was written by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Claude Lancelot (1615-1695). These men were monks at the Port Royal Abbey in France; an abbey which also produced a logic and grammar manuals for teaching Latin and vernacular European languages.

Aim of the Port-Royal Grammar

Еhe Port Royal Grammar seems to have had a pedagogical goal as its primary one. However, this goal was not learning a specific language, but rather learning any language.

It aims to provide an overview of the grammatical features shared by all languages.

As such, it was part of Port Royal’s overall programme of changing language teaching methodology.

Function of language

• According to the Grammar, we have to understand language as the expression of thought.

• “This is why the different sorts of signification which are embodied in words cannot be clearly understood if what has gone on in our minds previously has not been clearly understood, since words were invented only in order to make these thoughts known.”

• A thought (-proposition) consists in two ideas which are joined by the mental operation of affirmation and judged to be similar or dissimilar. The first is the subject (noun), the second the predicate (verb)

• The Port Royal Grammar has therefore been put by many (most famously, Chomsky) in the rationalist tradition of Pascal and Descartes

Port Royal and universals

• The Grammar holds that human reason is universal (and independent of language); and since every human language is an expression of this reason, there is also something universal to language.

• This rationalist view of language was already present in some medieval, modistic grammar, but the enterprise got new impetus with the new science-friendly atmosphere of the 17th Century.

Grammar and thought expression

• Grammar studies the art of speaking in such a way that thought is fully and clearly expressed (one difference with Panini and Sıbawayh is that it is obviously one’s own thought that deserves expression)

• This art is the same, independent of the language

• Notice that the idea is slightly different from modern conceptions of communication; the emphasis is on the expression rather than on understanding

Nouns and verbs

«And thus the greatest distinction to be made about what

occurs in our minds, is to say that one can consider the object

of our thought on the one hand, and the form or manner of our

thought, the main form being judgment, on the other hand.

[. . . ] It follows from this that men, having had need of signs in

order to mark everything that occurs in their minds, also found

it necessary to draw a most general distinction among words

into those that signify the objects of thoughts and those that

signify the form and the manner or mode of our thoughts [. . . ]».

The subject noun and the predicate noun stand for the objects of

thought, the copula for the mental operation of judgement.

What ‘idea’ is expressed by an adverb?

The desire which men have to abbreviate discourse is

what has given rise to adverbs, for the majority of these

particles are used only for signifying in a single word what

could only be otherwise indicated by a preposition and a

noun:

• sapienter (‘wisely’) in Latin for cum sapientia (‘with wisdom’)

• hodie (‘today’) in Latin for in hoc die (‘on this day’).

The only true verb is ‘est’

[. . . ] one can say that the verb in itself ought to have no other use save to mark the connection that we make in our minds between the two terms of a proposition, but it is only the verb to be [. . . ] which remained in this simple state [. . . ].

For, as men naturally proceed to shorten their expressions, they have almost always joined to the affirmation some other signification in the same word.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 984