Noam Chomsky considers The Port-Royal Grammar as evidence for his innate concept of language in his 1966 book
Cartesian Linguistics, associating the idea to Descartes. Chomsky's claim became soon disputed by historians of linguistics including
Hans Aarsleff,
Robin Lakoff,
E. F. K. Koerner, and Vivian Salmon. While Descartes is more famous than Arnauld and Lancelot, he wrote little about language and was not involved in the making of Port-Royal Grammar. The dispute also concerns Arnauld and Lancelot's analysis of their example sentence
Invisible God created the visible world. In a classical view, the sentence is composed of the three unary predicates 'God is invisible', 'he created the world', and 'the world is visible'. In other words, Arnauld and Lancelot, and their later interpreters including Husserl, considered semantics and thought as
compositional and being built up of logical propositions. Chomsky, in contrast, was looking for a historical precursor of his concept of
deep structure versus surface structure. For example, the surface structure
John and Mary are fishing is derived via a transformation from the purportedly not semantic but biological deep grammar structure
John is fishing and Mary is fishing. However, historians have argued that it is not what Arnauld and Lancelot meant. Nonetheless, based on his observations and Descartes's concept of
innate ideas, Chomsky eventually explained that
universal grammar is an innate brain structure which stems from a
genetic mutation in humans, thus reinterpreting linguistics as a
biological enterprise. In his conception,
dependency structures cannot be learned using reasoning, but are
acquired by the child from a hypothesized
language organ. The Port-Royal Grammar does not argue that people are born rational in the sense that they possess an innate rational grammar. Rather, it contends that grammatical phenomena were "invented" so that people could express their mental experiences. ==References==