La genèse des grammaires catégorielles et leur arrière-plan logico-philosophique : quelques remarques

Abstract

It is often said that, through Ajdukiewicz and Lesniewski, categorial grammars ultimately stem from the pure grammar Husserl spoke about in the fourth Logical Investigation. Without being false, this picture is not very unaccurate and, in order to understand adequately the history of the idea of categorial grammar, it is necessary to see it in its relationship with type theory. Montague grammar, for instance, shows very clearly that there is a systematic correspondance between categorial grammar on one hand and Church simple type theory on the other hand. As a matter of fact, we now knows that Ajdukiewicz most original idea has to do with functionality rather than with category: the system of categories - or, as linguists used to say, of parts of speech - is generated from two basic categories (n, s), and derived ones (n/s, etc.) are conceived as functions taking other categories as arguments. As there is nothing specially categorial in categorial grammars, one may wonder why they were so called. Once again, referring to Husserl doesn't suffice to answer: syntactic categories appeared first as an improved version of the syntactic genera introduced in Carnap's Logical Structure of Language. The role of Ryle, who was the first to pay due attention to the close relationship between types and categories, need to be stressed, too.