Abstract: Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée is the first classic piece of traditional grammar theory in the west, which had been forgotten for various reasons. After Chomsky claimed that it was a pioneer of transformational generative grammar, the book again attracted people's attention. In spite of Chomsky's high praise on it, the academic circles hold that Chomsky's grammar theory is not based on Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée. The author of this paper makes a comparison between these two theories and analyzes their relations. From a philosophical point of view,Chomsky's rationalism theory both inherited and abandoned the rationalism of Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée and Descartes' philosophy. All the three are interlinked in respects of transcendentalism, rationality and universality. From the linguistic viewpoint, the research object of this book and Chomsky theory is grammar rather than the language. They argue that the task of linguistics is to find deep and hidden organization principle by rationality. From the aspect of methodology, both of them fully use the relations between logic and language, different only in specific logical methods. The structural rules in Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée comply with Chomsky's phrase structure rules with nouns and verbs actually referring to noun phrases and verb phrases in Chomsky'. From what has been discussed above, we can conclude that Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée is an important inspiration and pioneer of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar.

Key words: Grammaire Générale et Raissonnée, Chomsky, transformational generative grammar, languge, traditional grammar theory