1. Medieval and Renaissance
France was slow in producing its own vernacular grammars. The earliest works on the French language, typically intended for the English, are essentially practical in orientation. These include orthographic treatises and works treating basic noun and verb morphology (e.g. Traité de la conjugaison française, c.1250; Orthographia gallica, c.1300), dialogues, model conversations or letters, texts for beginners such as Walter de Bibbesworth's Tretiz … pour aprise de langage (c.1250? 1290?) or the late-14th-c. Manières de langage, and early grammars written in England which depend heavily on the Latin grammarian Donatus, as represented by the earliest extant example, the Donat françois (c.1400), composed by ‘plusieurs bons clercs’ from Paris for Johan Barton.
Grammars for and by the English continued to appear, one of the most original examples being John Palsgrave's L'Éclaircissement de la langue française (1530), written in English, which unfortunately had virtually no influence in France. 16th-c. practical grammars for foreigners (e.g. G. du Wes, 1532; J. Pillot, 1550, for Germans; C. de Sainliens or Holyband, 1566, 1573) were written sometimes in Latin, sometimes in the vernacular.
It was thus not until 1531 that the first grammar written by a Frenchman was published in France, Jacques Dubois (or Sylvius)'s In linguam gallicam isagwge. The advent of printing and increased use of the vernacular had led to calls for the language to be codified and fixed so as to lend it prestige and inhibit change (e.g. Geoffroy Tory's eloquent plea in Champ fleury, 1529). Dubois's grammar, still in Latin, illustrates the difficulties experienced by early French grammarians who tried to force French into Latin models even where the languages differed fundamentally, as in noun morphology or use of articles. Typical also is its descriptive approach and format comprising a treatment of letters or sounds and a basic morphology; little space is devoted to syntax before Charles Maupas's Grammaire française (1607). Only gradually, as the century progressed, were grammarians such as Louis Meigret, whose Tretté de la grammere françoeze (1550) was the first written in French, able to see French at least to some extent on its own terms. This engendered debate as to which usage should constitute the norm, whether that of the educated, the royal court, the people, the lawcourts, or the chancellery. Robert Estienne's Traité de la grammaire française (1554) is essentially a synthesis of Dubois and Meigret, whilst his son Henri's Hypomneses de gall. lingua (1582) contains some new insights helped by his knowledge of Greek, but still attributes to French a declension system and neuter gender. Other works by Henri Estienne (e.g. Deux dialogues, 1578) attack Italian lexical borrowings. Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus's) Grammaire (1562, 1572) is of interest for its formal approach.
Meigret and Ramus, along with others such as Jacques Peletier du Mans, also took up the cause of reforming French orthography to bring it closer to pronunciation, albeit to no avail (for an example of Meigret's spelling see his Tretté cited above). The most radical proposal was by Honorat Rambaud (1578) for a completely new alphabet.
2. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The 17th c. continued to produce practical grammars retaining the traditional format and often intended for foreigners, but increasingly grounded on a firmer theoretical basis and including general insights (e.g. C. Maupas, Grammaire française, 1607; A. Oudin, Grammaire française, 1632; C. Irson, Nouvelle méthode, 1656; L. Chiflet, Essai d'une parfaite grammaire de la langue française, 1659). Two new and influential currents emerged. First, Vaugelas's Remarques (1647), born from the Academy and salon milieu, is a collection of observations on good French usage, defined as that of the soundest part of the court and contemporary authors. Despite its avowed emphasis on usage, the work gave rise to normative works codifying French to the last detail and often espousing a rigorous, not to say inhibitive, purism, as typified in the work of Bouhours. Vaugelas's format was also influential, producing a whole series of observations; even Ménage adopted it for his erudite Observations sur la langue française (1672, 1676). Secondly, the ‘Port-Royal grammar’, Arnauld and Lancelot's Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660), combining the tradition of medieval speculative grammar with Cartesianism, inaugurated philosophical rational grammar in France. The fundamental premiss that language reflects thought helps shape not only a novel analysis of the parts of speech but even the work's format. ‘Method’ becomes a keyword in later 17th-c. grammars (e.g. Denis Vairasse d'Allais's Grammaire méthodique, 1681).
The beginning of the 18th c. witnesses the continuation of purism, notably in commentaries on classical authors and in works which look to usage or often have a practical or didactic aim, but which nevertheless prepare the way for the great general grammars (e.g. Régnier-Desmarais, Traité de la grammaire française, 1705; Buffier, Grammaire française, 1709; P. Restaut, Principes généraux et raisonnés de la grammaire française, 1730). The 18th c., especially from 1740, is, however, the age of philosophical and rational grammars and the apogee for theoretical works on French; we might note, for instance, the two principal grammarians of the Encyclopédie, Du Marsais, whose Traité des tropes (1730) marks a move towards increased abstraction, and Beauzée, author of a Grammaire générale (1767) in which ‘la grammaire particulière’ is subordinated to the rules of general grammar. Rather than observing usage themselves, there was a tendency for the philosophes to include a certain category in universal grammar and then ‘discover’ it in French. Moreover, features observed by previous usage grammarians became the subject of necessary and absolute rules. Also worthy of note are Gabriel Girard's Les Vrais Principes de la langue française (1747) and Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and Grammaire in Volume 1 of his Cours d'études (1775). Condillac and the Idéologues dominated the linguistic thought of the end of the century, eclipsing, for instance, Jean-François Féraud's Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787-8). The end of the century witnessed a decline in works with theoretical orientation, with the most original contributions coming from Urbain Domergue (1745-1810), author of a Grammaire générale analytique (1785) who also founded a ‘Société des Amateurs de la Langue Française’ and a Journal de la langue française (1784-9, 1791-2), and Antoine-Isaac Sylvestre de Sacy, who in 1799 published his Principes de grammaire générale. Dieudonné Thiébault's Grammaire philosophique (1802) and Destutt de Tracy's Éléments d'idéologie (1801-15) signal the demise of general grammar in the early 19th c.
3. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
From a position of pre-eminence in the study of language, French linguistic thought declined markedly in quality in the 19th c. The work of the Idéologues was superseded by a proliferation of school grammars intended for primary and secondary use. Providing above all rules for the written language, they were essentially designed for teaching French orthography, and notably past-participle agreement. Charles-François Lhomond's Éléments de la grammaire française, first published in 1780, ran to numerous editions, as did the most successful work of the 19th c., Joseph-Michel Noël and Charles-Pierre Chapsal's Nouvelle grammaire française (1823). Compilations were also popular, notably Charles Girault-Duvivier's Grammaire des grammaires (1811), containing all the decisions of past usage grammarians. Ideals of purism and correctness were kept alive in such works as Desgrouais's Gasconismes corrigés, constantly re-edited from 1766 on.
Whilst historical comparative grammar and the study of Indo-European were important elsewhere in Europe, historical grammar only really penetrated into France from about 1880 with the work of Michel Bréal and Arsène Darmesteter; a particular interest was shown in semantics and semantic change (M. Bréal, Essai de sémantique, 1897; A. Darmesteter, La Vie des mots, 1887). Later, the study of comparative grammar and Indo-European were taken up in France, notably by Antoine Meillet.
School grammars have continued to appear in the 20th c., largely unaffected by changing theoretical perspectives. Many grammars of the early part of the century remained traditional (e.g. A. Dauzat, Grammaire raisonnée, 1947), but there was an important number of psychologically based grammars, such as Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon's Des mots à la pensée (1928-40) or Ferdinand Brunot's La Pensée et la langue (1922). Major publishing houses produce their own grammars (e.g. Grammaire Larousse du français contemporain, 1964). The long-awaited Grammaire de l'Académie Française of 1932, first promised in 1635, proved a disappointment; the standard reference work today for most educated Frenchmen is the Belgian Maurice Grevisse's Le Bon Usage, first published in 1936. While adopting a traditional grammatical format, the work also focuses on problematic questions.
On the whole, the findings of general and theoretical linguistics, especially Structuralism, have only slowly been assimilated into French grammars (e.g. G. Gougenheim, Système grammatical de la langue française, 1939). However, since the late 1950s a variety of different theories have left their mark on the description and analysis of French, including dependency grammar (L. Tesnière, Éléments de syntaxe structurale, 1959), Structuralism (T. Cristea, Grammaire structurale du français contemporain, 1974), and generativism (J. Dubois and M. Gross, Grammaire transformationnelle du français, 1965-77). [See also Linguistics.]
[<auth>Wendy Ayres-Bennett]
Bibliography
- See: F. Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, 13 vols. (1905-53)
- L. Kukenheim, Esquisse historique de la linguistique française et ses rapports avec la linguistique générale, 2nd edn. (1966)
- J.-C. Chevalier, Histoire de la syntaxe: naissance de la notion de complément dans la grammaire française (1530-1750) (1968)
- G. A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500-1700, 3 vols. (1976-88)
