How programming languages rehabilitate morphology

Résumé En

The word “syntax” has two slightly different meanings in linguistics and in formal sciences. On the one side, in linguistics, “syntax” is a part of the grammar, which describes how words can be combined into sentences. In the grammar of many natural languages (e.g., Indo-European languages and Japanese, but not Chinese), it is opposed to morphology, which describes the formation and variation of words. On the other side, in the study of formal languages---those of logic, mathematics, and computer science—“syntax” is taken as a synonym of grammar in general. This is in accordance with the Chomskyan viewpoint, which reduces morphology to syntax. Against this latter view, we will argue that 1) the notion of words' structure and variability has come back in object-oriented programming languages, making the distinction between morphology and syntax relevant again; 2) this opens the way to the use of some traditional linguistic categories---e.g. pronouns, derivation, analogy---to describe some features of formal languages and account for their expressiveness.