Syntactic Structures
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"Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalog, nor another speculative philosophy about the nature of Man and Language, but rather a rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicit measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar." Robert B. Lees in Language "I had already decided I wanted to be a linguist when I discovered this book. But it is unlikely that I would have stayed in the field without it. It has been the single most inspiring book on linguistics in my whole career." Henk van Riemsdijk
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Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.
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Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Just to say that this book is beautiful in its simplicity and clarity. So much easier to read than all the syntheses of Chomsky's work by other less easy to understand intellectuals. If you are an undergrad. you can get one up on your lecturers by reading this. My Prof. at Uni. had never read any of Chomsky's work but expounded interminably on "Chomskyan Theory" and Generative Grammar. A surprisingly good read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Written when Chomsky was 28 years old. Published in 1957. 114 pages and its impact is still felt. If Chomsky had not become a political activist his intellectual contribution to linguistics and related fields would have made him a household name like Einstein or Freud. This is the start of it all.
This book is also the source of the famous sentence "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" which in some books of quotations is his only entry.
This book is also the source of the famous sentence "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" which in some books of quotations is his only entry.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4 reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Essential reading for any serious language scholar
18 May 2010
Format:Paperback
In 1993,I was fortunate to inherit this book from my father who used it during his undergrad studies at Columbia University in the 1960s.It was as relevant to my studies of Foreign Language and Lit as it was to my music major dad. It was a terrible blow when it was stolen with my car some ten years later,and indeed I never could bring myself to tell my dad that our precious Chomsky collection was in my trunk. So I was actually tearful when I found it available on Amazon.
One must always stand in awe of the fact that this groundbreaking tome was Chomsky's Bachelor thesis. It is intimidating to me and anyone who gets past the first chapter that a college senior produced this astounding labor.He knows his subject and he knows it well.My entire understanding of syntax,surface structure and deep structure of language began from this work.It made the difference in my study of language and helped me grow from instinctive,intuitive knowledge to reasoned thoughtful understanding of how we communicate with our fellow humans.
One must always stand in awe of the fact that this groundbreaking tome was Chomsky's Bachelor thesis. It is intimidating to me and anyone who gets past the first chapter that a college senior produced this astounding labor.He knows his subject and he knows it well.My entire understanding of syntax,surface structure and deep structure of language began from this work.It made the difference in my study of language and helped me grow from instinctive,intuitive knowledge to reasoned thoughtful understanding of how we communicate with our fellow humans.
15 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Essential for Linguists
27 April 2000
Format:Paperback
Although Chomsky later changed his ideas towards linguistics in'Aspects of the Theory of Syntax', but this book is essential in understanding his relation to the Bloomfildean school and is essential for understanding 20'th century linguistics.
14 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Right, Back On The Corner
3 April 2004
Format:Paperback
Chomsky's *Syntactic Structures* is legendary today for its being the founding document in the field of generative grammar; but this is to say that the many theses of this book are poorly understood from a distance. Originally the student of Bloomfieldian Zellig Harris, Chomsky released this work after many years in Cambridge, Mass.; and although the traditional concerns of structuralist linguistics are well-represented in Chomsky's work, here this is through an engagement with the work of Willard van Orman Quine which has to my mind never been fully extracted. Chomsky took Quinean scruples concerning the "theory of meaning" as a guide for syntactic theory, namely as the extent to which an adequate syntax for natural language must "sin" against the strictures of compositionality embodied in formal languages; and although his strategy here has had its fans, the "stepwise" construction of his argument and its import have to my knowledge never been fully addressed.
Beginning with an immensely convincing case against the Markovian logic implicit in cybernetic analyses of communication, Chomsky sketches the extent to which various "rigorizations" of the communicative upshot of utterances (visions of the "speaker-hearer circuit" literally displayed by Saussure) fail to capture the grammatical articulation of sentences, and this in a *theoretically constitutive* way. The fate of each such "fail-safe" demonstrates the extent to which the "story about the story", the speaker's implicit grammar, serves an empirically regulative function (i.e., is palpably part of the observable activity of "reasoned" discourse); and this is presented in a theoretical vocabulary so lean as to have invited further formalization beyond the "core" theory's subsequent refinements by Chomsky and students.
In other words, this is essential reading for anyone trafficking in linguistic "transitions" of any kind: simply reaffirming a hostility to "Enlightenment commonplaces" will not relieve the researcher of the theoretical burdens imposed by the well-nigh-unavoidable desiderata of theoretical adequacy both explicit and implicit here. This is not a "what-if" narrative, concerning an alternate history for linguistic theory: this is just-so stuff which should constrain your understanding of what is already the case, and in no very "normative" way (though individuals primarily concerned with Chomsky's politics can easily absolve themselves of responsibility for linguistic theory by ignoring it). A true classic.
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