Cartesian Linguistics on Superphysics

Introduction

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My primary aim is simply to bring to the attention of those involved in the study of generative grammar and its implications some of the little-known work which has bearing on their concerns and problems and which often anticipates some of their specific conclusions.

Creative aspect of language use

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Descartes makes only scant reference to language in his writings.

He did a careful and intensive study of the limits of mechanical explanation. This carried him beyond physics to physiology and psychology.

La Mettrie and Bougeant

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The important things are:

the emphasis on the creative aspect of language use
the fundamental distinction between human language and the purely functional and stimulus-bound animal communication

Descartes argued that there must be a “thinking substance” to account for the facts that he cites.

Herder

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Descartes’s second test for determining whether automata are “real men” is also reinterpreted, within the context of the “great chain of being.”

Descartes argues that animal behavior is a matter of instinct. The perfection and specificity of animal instinct make it subject to mechanical explanation.

Humboldt

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Humboldt’s tries to develop a comprehensive theory of general linguistics using the Cartesian emphasis on the creative aspect of language use.36

Humboldt’s characterization of language:

as energeia (“activity” [Thätigkeit]) rather than ergon (“product” [Werk])
as “a generative activity [eine Erzeugung]” rather than “a lifeless product”

He extends and elaborates the formulations typical of Cartesian linguistics and romantic philosophy of language and aesthetic theory.

The structuralist emphasis on language

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The structuralist emphasis on language as “a system where everything holds together” is conceptually, at least, a direct outgrowth of the concern for organic form in Humboldtian linguistics.

For Humboldt, a language is not to be regarded as a mass of isolated phenomena – words, sounds, individual speech productions, etc. – but rather as an “organism” in which all parts are intercon- nected and the role of each element is determined by its relation to the gen- erative processes that constitute the underlying form.

Creative aspect of language use

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The study of the creative aspect of language-use develops from the assumption that linguistic and mental processes are virtually identical

Language provides the primary means for:

free expression of thought and feeling
the functioning of the creative imagination.

Similarly, much of the substantive discussion of grammar, throughout the development of what we have been calling “Cartesian linguistics,” derives from this assumption.

Port-Royal Grammar

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Turning from the general conception of grammatical structure to specific cases of grammatical analysis, we find many other attempts in the Port-Royal Grammar to develop the theory of deep and surface structure.

General Grammar

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Within the framework of Cartesian linguistics, a descriptive grammar is concerned with both sound and meaning.

In my terminology, it assigns to each sentence an abstract deep structure determining its semantic content and a surface structure determining its phonetic form.

How Language is Acquired and Used

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As a by-product of this study of langue, and against the background of rationalist theory of mind, certain views emerged as to how language is acquired and used.

Summary

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Returning to the remark of Whitehead’s that initiated this discussion, it seems that after a long interruption, linguistics and cognitive psychology are now turning their attention to approaches to the study of language structure and mental processes which in part originated and in part were revitalized in the “century of genius” and which were fruitfully developed until well into the nineteenth century.