Port Royal

The name given to a group of seventeenth-century scholars, based at the convent of Port Royal, south of Versailles, who, following the ideas of Descartes, developed a view of LANGUAGE in which grammatical CATEGORIES and STRUCTURES were seen as relatable to UNIVERSAL logical patterns of thought (an influential work was the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of C. Lancelot, A. Arnauld and others, published in 1660). The ideas of this school of thought became widely known in the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky drew certain parallels between them and his own conception of the relationship between LANGUAGE and mind.