Syntactic Structures

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).

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). Here, Chomsky's approach to syntax is fully formal (based on symbols and rules). At its base, Chomsky uses phrase structure rules, 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" 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,

Written when Chomsky was still an unknown scholar, 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. 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. 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.

Chomsky's interest in language started at an early age. When he was twelve, he studied Hebrew grammar under his father. He also studied Arabic in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania. 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). This is how Chomsky came to know a formal theory of linguistics. He soon decided to major in the subject.

For his thesis, Chomsky set out to apply Harris's methods to Hebrew. Following Harris's advice, he studied logic, philosophy, and mathematics. He found Harris's views on language much like Nelson Goodman's work on philosophical systems. Chomsky was also influenced by the works of W. V. O. Quine and Rudolf Carnap. 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. 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. For this, he looked for "generalizations" among the possible sets of grammatical rules. 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. 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.