Syntactic Structures

By Noam Chomsky

Synopsis: 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.

Published: February 1957 | ISBN-13: 978-3110172799

Book’s mini-bio: Syntactic Structures is a book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. A seminal work in 20th-century linguistics, it laid the foundation of Chomsky’s idea of transformational grammar. It contains the famous sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, which Chomsky offered as an example of a sentence that is completely grammatical, yet completely nonsensical. – Wikipedia

Author’s Homepage: http://www.chomsky.info

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