Syntactic Structures is a seminal work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax (the study of sentence structures) from semantics (the study of meaning).From :"...such semantic notions as reference, significance, and synonymity played no role in the discussion."
Based on lecture notes he had prepared for his students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1950s, Syntactic Structures was Chomsky's first book on linguistics and reflected the contemporary developments in early generative grammar. In it, Chomsky introduced his idea of a transformational generative grammar, succinctly synthesizing and integrating the concepts of transformation (pioneered by his mentor Zellig Harris, but used in a precise and integrative way by Chomsky), morphophonemic rules (introduced by Leonard Bloomfield) and an item-and-process style of grammar description (developed by Charles Hockett). See also and . Here, Chomsky's approach to syntax is fully formal (based on symbols and rules). At its base, Chomsky uses phrase structure rules,From : "In §§3-7 we outlined the development of some fundamental linguistic concepts in purely formal terms." which break down sentences into smaller parts. These are combined with a new kind of rules which Chomsky called "transformations". This procedure gives rise to different sentence structures. Chomsky stated that this limited set of rules "generates"Here, "generate" means giving a clear structural description of each sentence. In , Chomsky writes that "When we speak of a grammar as generating a sentence with a certain structural description, we mean simply that the grammar assigns this structural description to the sentence." all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language, which are infinite in number (not too dissimilar to a notion introduced earlier by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev). Although not explicitly stated in the book itself, this way of study was later interpreted to have valued language's innate place in the mind over language as learned behavior,According to , Hjelmslev and other European linguists, in contrast, had considered the generative calculus as perfectly non-psychological. See also
Written when Chomsky was still an unknown scholar, writes: "[Chomsky] was at the time an unknown 28-year-old who taught language classes at MIT" Syntactic Structures had a major impact on the study of knowledge, mind and mental processes, becoming an influential work in the formation of the field of cognitive science. It also significantly influenced research on computers and the brain.See the "Reception" section of this article. The importance of Syntactic Structures lies in Chomsky's persuasion for a biological perspective on language at a time when it was unusual, and in the context of formal linguistics. The book led to Chomsky's eventual recognition as one of the founders of what is now known as sociobiology. Some specialists have questioned Chomsky's theory, believing it is wrong to describe language as an ideal system. They also say it gives less value to the gathering and testing of data.See the "Criticisms" section of this article. Nevertheless, Syntactic Structures is credited to have changed the course of linguistics in general and American linguistics in particular in the second half of the 20th century.
Background
Chomsky's interest in language started at an early age. When he was twelve, he studied Hebrew grammar under his father.Specifically, Chomsky read David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar (Mikhlol) (1952), an annotated study of a 13th century Hebrew grammar. It was written by his father, William Chomsky, one of the leading Hebrew scholars at the time. See He also studied Arabic in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania.For its similarity to Hebrew. See and In 1947, he met Zellig Harris, the founder of the college's linguistics department. Harris was an established linguist. He did research in the way laid out by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. He let Chomsky proofread a copy of his book Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951).In the 1947 preface of , Zellig Harris writes that “N. Chomsky has given much-needed assistance with the manuscript." This is how Chomsky came to know a formal theory of linguistics. He soon decided to major in the subject.In his preface to , Chomsky writes that “My introduction to the field of linguistics was in 1947, when Zellig Harris gave me the proofs of his 'Methods in Structural Linguistics' to read."
For his thesis, Chomsky set out to apply Harris's methods to Hebrew. Following Harris's advice, he studied logic, philosophy, and mathematics. and He found Harris's views on language much like Nelson Goodman's work on philosophical systems.Especially Goodman's work on constructional systems and on the inadequacy of inductive approaches. See . writes: "Chomsky has said that he was convinced from his days as a student of Goodman's that there is no inductive learning." Chomsky was also influenced by the works of W. V. O. Quine writes: "Quine's critiques of logical empiricism also gave some reason to believe that [a non-taxonomic approach to linguistic theory] might be a plausible one." and Rudolf Carnap. states that among non-American philosophers, it was only Rudolf Carnap whom Chomsky read as a student (p. 3) writes that "It is well known that Carnap's post-Aufbau work (especially Logische Syntax der Sprache) influenced Chomsky directly to some extent." Quine showed that one cannot completely verify the meaning of a statement through observations. Carnap had developed a formal theory of language. It used symbols and rules that did not refer to meaning.
From there on, Chomsky tried to build a grammar of Hebrew. Such a grammar would generate the phonetic or sound forms of sentences. To this end, he organized Harris's methods in a different way. states: "The most significant discontinuity [between Harris's Methods and Chomsky's Syntactic Structures] is Chomsky's inversion of Harris's analytic procedures." To describe sentence forms and structures, he came up with a set of recursive rules. These are rules that refer back to themselves. He also found that there were many different ways of presenting the grammar. He tried to develop a method to measure how simple a grammar is. writes: "[Echoing] Goodman's pro-simplicity arguments ... the task of creating ... a simplicity measure is precisely the one Chomsky sets for himself in Chapter 4 of LSLT." For this, he looked for "generalizations" among the possible sets of grammatical rules. states: "We want the reduction of the number of elements and statements, any generalizations ... to increase the total simplicity of the grammar" Chomsky completed his undergraduate thesis The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1949. He then published a revised and expanded version of it as his master's thesis in 1951.
In 1951, Chomsky became a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. There, he tried to build an all-formal linguistic theory.Before Chomsky, Israeli mathematician and linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel had already shown in that formal languages and methods used in symbolic logic can be adapted to analyze human languages. It was a clear break with the existing tradition of language study. In 1953, Chomsky published his first paper as a scholar. In it he tried to adapt the symbol-based language of logic to describe the syntax of a human language. During his fellowship, Chomsky organized all his ideas into a huge manuscript. It was around 1,000 typewritten pages long. He gave it the title The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT).
In 1955, Chomsky found a job at MIT. He worked there as a linguist in the mechanical translation project. The same year he submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Pennsylvania. The university granted him a Ph.D. for his thesis Transformational Analysis. In fact, it was just the ninth chapter of LSLT.
Publication
In 1955, Chomsky had a doctorate in linguistics. Even so, he struggled at first to publish his theory and views on language. He offered the manuscript of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT) for publication. But MIT's Technology Press refused to publish it. He also saw a paper promptly rejected by the academic linguistics journal WORD.Chomsky writes in : "As for the reception accorded to LSLT [the Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory], there is little to say. I've already told you that I did not have the impression the reaction on the part of linguists was surprising. I offered LSLT to the MIT-Press – who refused it. Quite rightly, I think, because at that time the situation was very unfavourable for a general book on that subject, especially one by an unknown author. I also submitted a technical article on simplicity and explanation to the journal Word, at the suggestion of Roman Jakobson, but it was rejected virtually by return mail. So I had little hope of seeing any of this work published, at least in a linguistic journal." So he remained an outsider to the field of linguistics. His reviews and articles at the time were mostly published in non-linguistic journals.In particular, Chomsky wrote an academic paper in 1956 titled Three Models for the Description of Language published in the technological journal IRE Transactions on Information Theory (). It foreshadows many of the concepts presented in Syntactic Structures.
Mouton & Co. was a Dutch publishing house based in The Hague. They had gained academic reputation by publishing works on Slavic Studies since 1954. Particularly, they had published works by linguists Nicolaas van Wijk and Roman Jakobson. Soon they started a new series called Janua Linguarum or the "Gate of Languages." It was intended to be a series of "small monographs" on general linguistics.The series's editor van Schooneveld is quoted thus in : "I had originally conceived of the Janua as a series of small monographs of the size of a large article, too interesting to get drowned in a periodical amongst other contributions and to be lost to oblivion by the current of time." The first volume of the Janua Linguarum series was written by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. It was called Fundamentals of Language, published in 1956. Chomsky had already met Jakobson, a professor at Harvard University, during his fellowship years. Halle was Chomsky's graduate classmate at Harvard and then a close colleague at MIT. In 1956, Chomsky and Halle collaborated to write an article on phonology, published in a 1956 festschrift for Jakobson.