''Syntactic Structures'' is an influential work in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

by American linguist

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...

, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...

. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, Chomsky's presentation is recognized as one of the most significant 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, Chomsky argued for the independence of syntax (the study of sentence structures) from

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...

(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 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, Chomsky's first book presented contemporary developments in early generative grammar. The approach to syntax is fully formal (based on symbols and rules). At its base, Chomsky uses

phrase structure rules Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural langu ...

,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. Reiterating notions introduced to linguistics by the Danish linguist

Louis Hjelmslev Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studie ...

, 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. It was later interpreted that this way of study valued language's

innate {{Short pages monitor and for substitutions. These yield a string of

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s. A transformational rule "operates on a given string ... with a given constituent structure and converts it into a new string with a new derived constituent structure." It "may rearrange strings or may add or delete morphemes." Transformational rules are of two kinds: obligatory or optional. Obligatory transformations applied on the "terminal strings" of the grammar produce the "kernel of the language". Kernel sentences are simple, active, declarative and affirmative sentences. To produce passive, negative, interrogative or complex sentences, one or more optional transformation rules must be applied in a particular order to the kernel sentences. At the final stage of the grammar, morphophonemic rules convert a string of words into a string of

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s. Chomsky then applies this idea of transformational rules in the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

auxiliary verb An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a ...

system.

Borrowing of terminology

In ''Syntactic Structures'', the term "transformation" was borrowed from the works of

Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...

. Harris was Chomsky's initial mentor. Harris used the term "transformation" to describe equivalence relations between sentences of a language. By contrast, Chomsky's used the term to describe a formal rule applied to underlying structures of sentences. Chomsky also borrowed the term "generative" from a previous work of mathematician

Emil Post Emil Leon Post (; February 11, 1897 – April 21, 1954) was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Life Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Gove ...

.In , Chomsky writes that he was "following a familiar technical use of the term "generate," cf. ". In , Chomksy justifies his choice of the term "generate", writing that "the term 'generate' is familiar in the sense intended here in logic, particularly in Post's theory of combinatorial systems. Furthermore, 'generate' seems to be the most appropriate translation for Humboldt's term ''erzeugen'', which he frequently uses, it seems, in essentially the sense here intended. Since this use of the term 'generate' is well established both in logic and in the tradition of linguistic theory." Post wanted to "mechanically eriveinferences from an initial axiomatic sentence". Chomsky applied Post's work on

logical inference Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word ''wikt:infer, infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deductive reasoning, deduction and in ...

to describe sets of strings (sequence of letters or sounds) of a human language. When he says a finite set of rules "generate" (i.e. "recursively enumerate") the set of potentially infinite number of sentences of a particular human language, he means that they provide an explicit, structural description of those sentences.In , Chomsky writes that "by a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences."

Justification of grammars

In the sixth chapter titled "On the Goals of Linguistic Theory", Chomsky writes that his "fundamental concern" is "the problem of justification of grammars". He draws parallels between the theory of language and theories in

physical sciences Physical science is a branch of natural science that studies non-living systems, in contrast to life science. It in turn has many branches, each referred to as a "physical science", together called the "physical sciences". Definition Phy ...

. He compares a finite

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

utterance In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, often beginning and ending with a clear pause. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written langu ...

s of a particular language to " observations". He likens grammatical rules to "

laws Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vari ...

" which are stated in terms of "hypothetical constructs" such as

phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...

s, etc. According to Chomsky, the criteria for the "justification of grammars" are "external conditions of adequacy", the "condition of generality" and "simplicity". To choose the best possible grammar for a given corpus of a given language, Chomsky shows his preference for the "evaluation procedure" (which uses the aforementioned criteria). He rejects the "discovery procedure" writes: "Our main point is that a linguistic theory should not be identified with a manual of useful procedures, nor should it be expected to provide mechanical procedures for the discovery of grammars" (employed in structural linguistics and supposed to automatically and mechanically produce the correct grammar of a language from a corpus notes that "the fullest and most interesting expression of 'discovery procedure' is hebook ''Methods in Structural Linguistics'' () by Zellig Harris, Chomsky's mentor.). He also dismisses the "decision procedure" (supposed to automatically choose the best grammar for a language from a set of competing grammars). Chomsky thus shows preference for "explanatory depth" with some "empirical inadequacies" over the pursuit of very detailed empirical coverage of all data.See . Chomsky characterized this approach as the "Galilean Style" of inquiry which had already been applied in modern natural sciences with "great success" since the 17th century.

Application of transformational grammar in English

In the seventh chapter titled "Some Transformations in English", Chomsky strictly applies his just-proposed transformation-based approach on some aspects of English. He treats at length the formation of

negative

passive Passive may refer to: * Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive * Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works * Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of o ...

sentences, yes-no and wh- interrogative sentences, etc. He claims in the end that transformational analysis can describe "a wide variety of ... distinct phenomena" in English grammar in a "simple", "natural" and "orderly" way. states:"a wide variety of apparently distinct phenomena n English languageall fall into place in a very simple and natural way when we adopt the viewpoint of transformational analysis and that, consequently, the grammar of English becomes much more simple and orderly."

Constructional homonymity and distinct levels of linguistic analysis

In the eighth chapter titled "The explanatory power of linguistic theory", Chomsky writes a linguistic theory cannot content itself by just generating valid grammatical sentences. It also has to account for other structural phenomena at different levels of linguistic representation. At a certain linguistic level, there can be two items which can be understood having different meanings but they are structurally indistinguishable within that level. This is called a “constructional homonymity” ic The relevant ambiguity can be resolved by establishing a higher level of linguistic analysis. At this higher level, the two items can be clearly shown having two different structural interpretations. In this way, constructional homonymities at the phonemic level can be resolved by establishing the level of morphology, and so forth. One of the motivation of establishing a distinct, higher level of linguistic analysis is, then, to explain the structural ambiguity due to the constructional homonymities at a lower level. On the other hand, each linguistic level also captures some structural similarities within the level that are not explained in lower levels. Chomsky uses this argument as well to motivate the establishment of distinct levels of linguistic analysis. Chomsky then shows that a grammar which analyzes sentences up to the phrase structure level contains many constructional homonymities at the phrase structure level where the resulting ambiguities need to be explained at a higher level. Then he shows how his newly invented “transformational level” can naturally and successfully function as that higher level. He further claims that any phrase structure grammar which cannot explain these ambiguities as successfully as transformational grammar does must be considered "inadequate".

Role of semantics in syntax

In the ninth chapter titled "Syntax and Semantics", Chomsky reminds that his analysis so far has been "completely formal and non-semantic." He then offers many counterexamples to refute some common linguistic assertions about grammar's reliance on meaning. He concludes that the correspondence between meaning and grammatical form is "imperfect", "inexact" and "vague." Consequently, it is "relatively useless" to use meaning "as a basis for grammatical description". To support his point, Chomsky considers a similar relation between semantics and

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

. He shows that in order to build a theory of

phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...

distinction based on meaning would entail "complex", "exhaustive" and "laborious investigation" of an "immense", "vast

". By contrast, phonemic distinctness can be easily explained in a "straightforward" way and in "completely non-semantic terms" with the help of "pair tests". Chomsky also claims that a strictly formal, non-semantic framework of syntactic theory might ultimately be useful to support a parallel independent semantic theory.Because it would "reveal" insights about sentence structures. See

Rhetorical style

Randy Allen Harris, a specialist of the

rhetoric of science Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged following a number of similarly-oriented disciplines during the late 20th century, including the disciplin ...

, writes that ''Syntactic Structures'' "appeals calmly and insistently to a new conception" of linguistic science. He finds the book "lucid, convincing, syntactically daring, the calm voice of reason ... peakingdirectly to the imagination and ambition of the entire field." It also bridged the "rhetorical gulf" to make the message of ''The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (a highly abstract, mathematically dense, and "forbiddingly technical" work) more palatable to the wider field of linguists. In a more detailed examination of the book, Harris finds Chomsky's argumentation in ''Syntactic Structures'' "multilayered and compelling". Chomsky not only makes a logical appeal (i.e.

logos ''Logos'' (, ; grc, λόγος, lógos, lit=word, discourse, or reason) is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric and refers to the appeal to reason that relies on logic or reason, inductive and deductive reasoning. Ari ...

) to a highly formalized model of language, but also appeals explicitly and tacitly to the

ethos Ethos ( or ) is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution, and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to ...

of science. In particular, Chomsky’s analysis of the complex English auxiliary verb system in ''Syntactic Structures'' had great rhetorical effect. It combined simple phrase structure rules with a simple transformational rule. This treatment was based entirely on formal simplicity. Various linguists have described it as “beautiful”, “powerful”, “elegant”, “revealing”, “insightful”, “beguiling” and “ingenious”. wrote that “ homsky’sexamples of defects of phrase structure grammar were illustrated simultaneously with the demonstration that grammars containing the more powerful transformational rules can handle the same phenomena in an elegant and revealing manner.”According to , "this apparently curious analysis is rather ingenious" and "the powerful tool of different levels of structure related by transformations was particularly beguiling, since transformations appeared to offer a means of explaining the often amazingly complex relationships between the forms of sentences and their understanding."In his introduction to ''Syntactic Structures'' (), American linguist David Lightfoot wrote that "this ingenious transformation...avoided hopelessly complex phrase structure rules and yielded an elegant account... ” According to American linguist Frederick Newmeyer, this particular analysis won many “supporters for Chomsky” and “immediately led to some linguists’ proposing generative-transformational analysis of particular phenomena”. According to British linguist E. Keith Brown, "the elegance and insightfulness of this account was instantly recognized, and this was an important factor in ensuring the initial success of the transformational way of looking at syntax." American linguist Mark Aronoff wrote that this “beautiful analysis and description of some very striking facts was the rhetorical weapon that drove the acceptance of homsky’stheory”. He added that in Chomsky’s treatment of English verbs, “the convergence of theory and analysis provide a description of facts so convincing that it changed the entire field”. Raymond Oenbring, a doctorate in the rhetoric of science, thinks that Chomsky "overstates the novelty" of transformational rules. He "seems to take all the credit for them" even though a version of them had already been introduced by

in a previous work. He writes that Chomsky himself was "cautious" to "display deference" to prevailing linguistic research. His enthusiastic followers such as Lees were, by contrast, much more "confrontational". They sought to drive a "rhetorical wedge" between Chomsky's work and that of post-Bloomfieldians (i.e. American linguists in the 1940s et 1950s), arguing that the latter does not qualify as linguistic "science".

Reception

Impact on linguistics

In an early review of the book, American structural linguist

Charles F. Voegelin Charles Frederick "Carl" Voegelin (January 14, 1906 – May 22, 1986), often cited as C. F. Voegelin, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the Al ...

wrote that ''Syntactic Structures'' posed a fundamental challenge to the established way of doing linguistic research. He stated that it had the potential to accomplish "a

Copernican revolution The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar Sys ...

" within linguistics. Another American linguist Martin Joos called the Chomskyan brand of linguistic theory a "heresy" within the Bloomfieldian tradition. These early remarks proved to be prescient. American linguist

Paul Postal Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist. Biography Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. I ...

commented in 1964 that most of the "syntactic conceptions prevalent in the United States" were "versions of the theory of

phrase structure grammar The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue (Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in th ...

s in the sense of Chomsky". By 1965, linguists were saying that ''Syntactic Structures'' had "mark dan epoch", had a "startling impact" and created a Kuhnian "revolution". British linguist John Lyons wrote in 1966 that "no work has had a greater influence upon the current linguistic theory than Chomsky's ''Syntactic Structures''." British historian of linguistics

R. H. Robins Robert Henry Robins, FBA (1 July 1921 – 21 April 2000), affectionately known to his close ones as Bobby Robins, was a British linguist. Before his retirement, he spent his entire career at the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the ...

wrote in 1967 that the publication of Chomsky's ''Syntactic Structures'' was "probably the most radical and important change in direction in

descriptive linguistics In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013). All acad ...

and in linguistic theory that has taken place in recent years". Another historian of linguistics

Frederick Newmeyer Frederick J. (Fritz) Newmeyer (born January 30, 1944) is an American linguist who is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the ...

considers ''Syntactic Structures'' "revolutionary" for two reasons. Firstly, it showed that a formal yet non-

empiricist In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...

theory of language was possible. Chomsky demonstrated this possibility in a practical sense by formally treating a fragment of

English grammar English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, Sentence (linguistics), sentences, and whole texts. This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English ...

. Secondly, it put syntax at the center of the theory of language. Syntax was recognized as the focal point of language production, in which a finite set of rules can produce an infinite number of sentences. Subsequently,

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

(i.e. the study of structure and formation of words) and

(i.e. the study of organization of sounds in languages) were relegated in importance. American linguist Norbert Hornstein wrote that before ''Syntactic Structures'', linguistic research was overly preoccupied with creating hierarchies and categories of all observable language data. One of the "lasting contributions" of ''Syntactic Structures'' is that it shifted the linguistic research methodology to abstract, rationalist theory-making based on contacts with data, which is the "common scientific practice".

Impact on other disciplines

;Psychology The generative grammar of ''Syntactic Structures'' heralded Chomsky's

mentalist Mentalism is a performing art in which its practitioners, known as mentalists, appear to demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. Performances may appear to include hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precogniti ...

perspective in linguistic analysis. Shortly after its publication, in 1959, Chomsky wrote a critical review of

B.F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. ...

's ''

Verbal Behavior ''Verbal Behavior'' is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with termino ...

''. Skinner had presented the acquisition of human language in terms of conditioned responses to outside

stimuli A stimulus is something that causes a physiological response. It may refer to: * Stimulation ** Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity ** Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception * Stimulus (eco ...

and

reinforcement In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence applied that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus. This strengthening effect may be measured as a higher freq ...

. Chomsky opposed this

behaviorist Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...

model. He argued that humans produce language using separate syntactic and semantic components inside the mind. He presented the generative grammar as a coherent abstract description of this underlying

psycholinguistic Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

reality. Chomsky's argument had a forceful impact on psycholinguistic research. It changed the course of the discipline in the following years.According to : " homsky's generative system of ruleswas more powerful that anything ... psycholinguists had heretofore had at their disposal. twas of special interest to these theorists. Many psychologists were quick to attribute generative systems to the minds of speakers and quick to abandon ... Behaviorism." ;Philosophy ''Syntactic Structures'' initiated an interdisciplinary dialog between

philosophers of language A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

and linguists. American philosopher John Searle called it a "remarkable intellectual achievement" of its time. He compared the book "to the work of Keynes or Freud". He credited it with producing not only a "revolution in linguistics", but also having a "revolutionary effect" on "

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

and psychology". Chomsky and Willard Van Orman Quine, a stridently anti-mentalistic philosopher of language, debated many times on the merit of Chomsky's linguistic theories. Many philosophers supported Chomsky's idea that natural languages are Psychological nativism#Language, innate and syntactically rule-governed. They also believed in the existence of rules in the human mind which bind meanings to

s. The investigation of these rules started a new era in philosophical semantics. writes: "That natural languages are indeed not systematic enough to allow formal treatment ... is ... a complaint that has been leveled against natural languages by philosophers for centuries. The work of Chomsky in generative linguistics apparently inspired much more confidence in philosophers and logicians to assert that perhaps natural languages weren't as unsystematic and misleading as their philosophical predecessors had made them out to be ... at the end of 1960s formal semantics began to flourish." writes: "Recent work by Chomsky and others is doing much to bring the complexities of natural languages within the scope of serious semantic theory". ;Computer science With its formal and logical treatment of language, ''Syntactic Structures'' also brought linguistics and the new field of computer science closer together. Computer scientist Donald Knuth (winner of the Turing Award) recounted that he read ''Syntactic Structures'' in 1961 and was influenced by it.From the preface of : "... researchers in linguistics were beginning to formulate rules of grammar that were considerably more mathematical than before. And people began to realize that such methods are highly relevant to the artificial languages that were becoming popular for computer programming, even though natural languages like English remained intractable. I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing—so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's ''Syntactic Structures'' along with me on my honeymoon in 1961. During odd moments, while crossing the Atlantic in an ocean liner and while camping in Europe, I read that book rather thoroughly and tried to answer some basic theoretical questions. Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition! The mathematical, linguistic, and algorithmic parts of my life had previously been totally separate. During the ensuing years those three aspects became steadily more intertwined; and by the end of the 1960s I found myself a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, primarily because of work that I had done with respect to languages for computer programming." Chomsky's "Three models" paper (), published a year prior to the ''Syntactic Structures'' and containing many of its ideas, was crucial to the development of the theory of formal languages within computer science. writes:"[Papers like the "Three Models"] had a huge, lasting influence on pure computer science" and that they are cited in "virtually every introduction to compiler design". states that "Chomsky's notion of a context-free grammar ... has aided immensely the specification of programming languages." ;Neuroscience In 2011, a group of French neuroscientists conducted research to verify if actual brain mechanisms worked in the way that Chomsky suggested in ''Syntactic Structures''. The results suggested that specific regions of the brain handle syntactic information in an abstract way. These are independent from other brain regions that handle semantic information. Moreover, the brain analyzes not just mere strings of words, but hierarchical structures of constituents. These observations validated the theoretical claims of Chomsky in ''Syntactic Structures''. In 2015, neuroscientists at New York University conducted experiments to verify if the human brain uses "hierarchical structure building" for processing languages. They measured the magnetic and electric activities in the brains of participants. The results showed that "[human] brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard." This "[reflected] a hierarchy in our Neurolinguistics, neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time." These results bore out Chomsky's hypothesis in ''Syntactic Structures'' of an "internal grammar mechanism" inside the brain.

Criticisms

;Erroneous idealization In his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, American linguist Charles Hockett considered ''Syntactic Structures'' one of "only four major breakthroughs in modern linguistics".The other three are Sir William Jones's address to the Asiatic Society in 1786, Karl Verner's ''Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung'' in 1875 and Ferdinand de Saussure's ''Course in General Linguistics, Cours de Linguistique Générale'' in 1916. But he rapidly turned into a fierce critic of Chomskyan linguistics. By 1966, Hockett rejected " homsky'sframe of reference in almost every detail". In his 1968 book ''The State of the Art'', Hockett writes that Chomsky's main fallacy is that he treats language as a formal, well-defined, stable system and proceeds from this idealized abstraction. Hockett believes such an idealization is not possible. He claims that there is no Empiricism, empirical evidence that our language faculty is, in reality, a well-defined underlying system. The sources that give rise to language faculty in humans, e.g. physical genetic transmission and cultural transmission, are themselves poorly defined. states: "we must not promote our more or less standardized by-and-large characterization of the language to the status of a monolithic ideal, nor infer that because we can achieve a fixed characterization some such monolithic ideal exists, in the lap of God or in the brain of each individual speaker." Hockett also opposed Chomsky's hypothesis that syntax is completely independent of the study of meaning. ;Non-empiricism Contrary to Hockett, British linguist Geoffrey Sampson thought that Chomsky's assumptions about a well-defined grammaticality are "[justified] in practice." It brought syntax "within the purview of scientific description". He considers it a "great positive contribution to the discipline". However, he maintains that Chomsky's linguistics is overly "intuition-based". For him, it relies too much on native speakers' subjective Introspection, introspective judgments about their own language. Consequently, language data empirically observed by impersonal third parties are given less importance. ;Influence of ''The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' According to Sampson, ''Syntactic Structures'' largely owes its good fortune of becoming the dominant theoretical paradigm in the following years to the charisma of Chomsky's intellect. Sampson writes that there are many references in ''Syntactic Structures'' to Chomsky's own ''The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (LSLT) in matters regarding the formal underpinnings of Chomsky's approach, but ''LSLT'' was not widely available in print for decades. Nevertheless, Sampson's argument runs, ''Syntactic Structures'', albeit "sketchy", derived its "aura of respectability" from ''LSLT'' lurking in the background. In turn, the acceptance of Chomsky's future works rested on the success of ''Syntactic Structures''. In the view of British-American linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''Syntactic Structures'' boldly claims that "it is impossible, not just difficult" for finite-state devices to generate all grammatical sentences of English, and then alludes to ''LSLT'' for the "rigorous proof" of this. But in reality, ''LSLT'' does not contain a valid, convincing proof dismissing finite-state devices. ;Originality Pullum also remarks that the "originality" of ''Syntactic Structures'' is "highly overstated". For him, it "does not properly credit the earlier literature on which it draws". He shows in detail how the approach in ''Syntactic Structures'' goes directly back to the work of the mathematical logician

on formalizing Mathematical proof, proof. But "few linguists are aware of this, because Post's papers are not cited." Pullum adds that the use of formal axiomatic systems to generate probable sentences in language in a Top-down parsing, top-down manner was first proposed by

in 1947, ten years before the publication of ''Syntactic Structures''. This is downplayed in ''Syntactic Structures''. ;Necessity of transformations In 1982, Pullum and another British linguist Gerald Gazdar argued that Chomsky's criticisms of Context-free grammar, context-free phrase structure grammar in ''Syntactic Structures'' are either mathematically flawed or based on incorrect assessments of the empirical data. They stated that a purely phrase structure treatment of grammar can explain linguistic phenomena better than one that uses transformations.Versions of such non-transformational phrase structure grammars include Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) and Lexical functional grammar (LFG).

Honors

In 2000, University of Minnesota's Center for Cognitive Sciences compiled a list of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century. In total, 305 scholarly works and one movie were nominated via the internet. ''Syntactic Structures'' was ranked number one on this list, marking it as the most influential work of cognitive science of the century.See the list of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century online here: https://web.archive.org/web/20040821111702/http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html ''Syntactic Structures'' was included in ''The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written'', a book on intellectual history by British literary critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith published in 1998. ''Syntactic Structures'' was also featured in a list of 100 best English language non-fiction books since 1923 picked by the American weekly magazine Time Magazine, Time.

Notes and references

Notes

References

Works cited

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External links

''Syntactic Structures'' preview in Google Books

50 years of Syntactic Structures
{{Authority control Books by Noam Chomsky Cognitive science literature 1957 non-fiction books Syntax books Philosophy of logic fr:Noam Chomsky#Linguistique