A flagship research programme of the IAPL
Reconstructing the grammatical architecture of anticipation — across languages, across cultures, across time.
The Predictive Grammar programme is the flagship multilingual research initiative of the IAPL, directed by Professor Mathieu Guidère.
The central hypothesis is that grammar is not merely descriptive of the world as it is, but also predictive of the world as it may be.
Where traditional grammar describes the past and present, predictive grammar charts how languages anticipate the future.
To study grammar is to study what a language believes is coming next. Prof. Mathieu Guidère
Mathieu Guidère is Professor at the University of Paris.
The programme articulates its theoretical framework around seven foundational principles.
Prediction is not a rhetorical ornament but an irreducible grammatical function.
Predictive phenomena form a coherent system within each language.
In many languages, anticipation operates through aspect and evidentiality.
Modal categories encode degrees of anticipation.
Discourse organises anticipation through narrative and prospective connectives.
Each language selects a subset of the typological space.
A grammar of anticipation is also an anthropology of the future.
The programme combines four complementary methodologies.
Close reading of classical and modern texts.
Systematic comparison across language families.
Analysis of large annotated corpora.
Formal and neural modelling of predictive phenomena.
The programme is genuinely multilingual.
Arabic French English Spanish Portuguese Italian German Swedish Russian Bulgarian Polish Hebrew Aramaic Amazigh Turkish Persian Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Guaraní Ainu
Work is coordinated across research nodes hosted by partner institutions.
The programme produces a range of scholarly outputs:
The programme is supported by the IAPL and partner institutions.
The Predictive Grammar programme welcomes collaboration.
Contact the programme