Abstract
In his book Les Atomes (1913), Jean Perrin identified one of the fundamental characteristics of the scientific process as the attempt to" explain the complicated visible by the simple invisible ". This characterization fits perfectly with the explanatory effort of modern linguistics.
Taking the title of a book by Steven Pinker (Words and Rules, 1999), we can approach language as a mental system, inscribed in the mind and brain of the speaker, and structured from two types of entities : inventories of elements, and rules that combine elements to form higher-order expressions. This bipartition has a long history, but it was taken up and structured in detail by generative grammar, starting in the mid-twentieth century, under the impetus of Noam Chomsky's innovative ideas.
In this first lecture, I'd like to trace some fundamental ideas about the organization of language and discuss the building blocks of mental grammar. The central theme will be the structure and operation of the recursive assembly rule (Merge in English), the fundamental Combinatorics procedure responsible for the unlimited potential of language.
