Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures is a seminal work in linguistics by American linguist Noam

Syntactic Structures
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.[1][2] It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously",[3] 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).[4][note 1]

Based on lecture notes he had prepared for his students at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in the mid-1950s,[note 2] 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).[5][6][7]
Here, Chomsky's approach to syntax is fully formal (based on symbols and rules). At
its base, Chomsky uses phrase structure rules,[note 3] 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.[8]
First edition cover
Chomsky stated that this limited set of rules "generates"[9][note 4] all and only the
Author Noam Chomsky
grammatical sentences of a given language, which are infinite in number (not too
dissimilar to a notion introduced earlier by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev[5]).[10][11] Language English
Although not explicitly stated in the book itself, this way of study was later Subject Natural language syntax
interpreted to have valued language's innate place in the mind over language as Publisher Mouton & Co.
learned behavior,[note 5][12][note 6][13]
Publication February 1957
date
Written when Chomsky was still an unknown scholar,[note 7]
Syntactic Structures had
a major impact on the study of knowledge, mind and mental processes, becoming an Media type Print
influential work in the formation of the field of cognitive science.[14] It also Pages 117
significantly influenced research on computers and the brain.[note 8] The importance of Preceded by The Logical Structure of
Syntactic Structures lies in Chomsky's persuasion for a biological perspective on Linguistic Theory (unpublished
language at a time when it was unusual, and in the context of formal linguistics where mimeographed or microfilm
it was unexpected.[12] The book led to Chomsky's eventual recognition as one of the version)
founders of what is now known as sociobiology.[15][16] Some specialists have Followed by Aspects of the Theory of
questioned Chomsky's theory, believing it is wrong to describe language as an ideal Syntax
system. They also say it gives less value to the gathering and testing of data.[note 9]
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.[note 10] He
also studied Arabic in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania.[note 11] 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.[17] He let Chomsky proofread a copy of his book Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951).[note 12] This is how Chomsky
came to know a formal theory of linguistics. He soon decided to major in the subject.[18][note 13]

For his thesis, Chomsky set out to apply Harris's methods to Hebrew. Following Harris's advice, he studied logic, philosophy, and
mathematics.[19] He found Harris's views on language much like Nelson Goodman's work on philosophical systems.[note 14] Chomsky
was also influenced by the works of W. V. O. Quine[note 15] and Rudolf Carnap.[note 16][note 17] Quine showed that one cannot completely
verify the meaning of a statement through observations.[20] Carnap had developed a formal theory of language. It used symbols and
rules that did not refer to meaning.[21]
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.[note 18] 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.[note 19] For this, he looked for "generalizations" among
the possible sets of grammatical rules.[note 20] 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.[22] There, he tried to build
an all-formal linguistic theory.[note 21] It was a clear break with the existing tradition of
language study.[23] In 1953, Chomsky published his first paper as a scholar.[24] 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).[25]
Noam Chomsky, the author of Syntactic
Structures (1977 photo)
In 1955, Chomsky found a job at MIT. He worked there as a linguist in the mechanical
translation project.[26] 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.[27]

Situatedness in linguistic theory

At the time of its publication, Syntactic Structures presented the state of the art of Zellig Harris's formal model of language analysis
which is called transformational generative grammar.[5] It can also be said to present Chomsky's version or Chomsky's theory because
there is some original input on a more technical level. The central concepts of the model, however, follow from Louis Hjelmslev's book
Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which was published in 1943 in Danish and followed by an English translation by Francis J.
Whitfield in 1953.[5][6][7][28] The book sets up an algebraic tool for linguistic analysis which consists of terminals and inventories of all
different types of linguistic units, similar to terminal and nonterminal symbols in formal grammars. First, it functions as a descriptive
device, or as Hjelmslev explains it:

"We demand for example from the theory of language that it allow to describe correctly and exhaustively not only such given
French text, but also all existing French texts, and not only these but also all possible and conceivable French texts."[29]

When this work is done to a satisfactory level, it will also become possible to predict all the grammatical sentences of a given language:

"Thanks to the linguistic knowledge thus acquired, we will be able to construct, for the same language, all conceivable or
theoretically possible texts."[30]

Hjelmslev also points out that an algorithmic description of a language could generate an infinite number of products from a finite
number of primitive elements:[5]

"When we compare the inventories yielded at the various stages of the deduction, their size will usually turn out to decrease as
the procedure goes on. If the text is unrestricted, i.e., capable of being prolonged through constant addition of further parts …
it will be possible to register an unrestricted number of sentences"[13]

These are logical consequences of the mathematical systems proposed by David Hilbert and Rudolf Carnap which were first adopted
into linguistics by Hjelmslev[5] whose ideas are reiterated by Chomsky:

"The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the
sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L. The grammar of L will thus be a device that
generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones"
 — Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures
Chomsky likewise states that a recursive device such as closed loops would allow the grammar to generate an infinite number of
sentences.[31]

Although the Bloomfieldian school of early to mid-20th century linguists were nicknamed 'American structuralists', they essentially
rejected the basic tenets of structuralism: that linguistic form is explained through meaning, and that linguistics belongs to the domain of
sociology.[5][6][7]

Chomsky, like Harris and other American linguists, agreed that there is no causal link from semantics to syntax.[5]

How to translate this idea into a scientific statement remained a vexing issue in American linguistics for decades.[5] Harris and Rulon
Wells justified analyzing the object as part of the verb phrase per 'economy'; but this term, again, merely suggested the perceived
'easiness' of the practice.[32]

In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky changes the meaning of Hjelmslev's principle of arbitrariness which meant that the generative
calculus is merely a tool for the linguist and not a structure in reality.[5][13] David Lightfoot however points out in his introduction to the
second edition that there were few points of true interest in Syntactic Structures itself, and the eventual interpretations that the rules or
structures are 'cognitive', innate, or biological would have been made elsewhere, especially in the context of a debate between Chomsky
and the advocates of behaviorism.[12] But decades later, Chomsky makes the clear statement that syntactic structures, including the
object as a dependent of the verb phrase, are caused by a genetic mutation in humans.[33]

Publication
In 1955, Chomsky had a doctorate in linguistics. Even so, he struggled at first to publish his theory and views on language.[34] 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.[note 22] So he remained an outsider to the
field of linguistics. His reviews and articles at the time were mostly published in non-linguistic journals.[35][note 23]

Mouton & Co. was a Dutch publishing house based in The Hague. They had gained academic reputation by publishing works on Slavic
Studies since 1954.[36] 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."[37] It was intended to be a series of "small monographs" on general
linguistics.[note 24] 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.[38] 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 festschrift for Jakobson.[39] The festschrift was published by Mouton in
1956.

Cornelis van Schooneveld was the editor of the Janua Linguarum series at Mouton. He was a Dutch linguist and a direct student of
Jakobson.[40] He was looking for monographs to publish for his series. Consequently, he visited Chomsky at MIT in 1956. With Morris
Halle's (and possibly Jakobson's) mediation,[36] Chomsky showed van Schooneveld his notes for his introductory linguistics course for
undergraduate students. Van Schooneveld took an interest in them. He offered to publish an elaborate version of them at Mouton, to
which Chomsky agreed.[note 2]

Chomsky then prepared a manuscript of the right size (no longer than 120 pages)[note 25] that would fit the series. After revising an
earlier manuscript, Chomsky sent a final version in the first week of August in 1956 to van Schooneveld.[note 26] The editor had
Chomsky rename the book's title to Syntactic Structures for commercial purposes.[note 27] The book was also pre-ordered in big numbers
by MIT. These gave more incentives to Mouton to publish the book. Mouton finally published Chomsky's monograph titled Syntactic
Structures in the second week of February 1957.

Soon after the book's first publication, Bernard Bloch, editor of the prestigious journal Language, gave linguist Robert Benjamin Lees, a
colleague of Chomsky's at MIT, the opportunity to write a review of the book. Lees's very positive[note 28] essay-length review appeared
in the July–September 1957 issue of Language.[41] This early but influential review made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic
research landscape. Shortly thereafter the book created a putative "revolution" in the discipline.[note 29] Later, some linguists began to
question whether this was really a revolutionary breakthrough.[42] A critical and elaborate account is given in Chomskyan
(R)evolutions.[43] Although Frederick Newmeyer states that "the publication of Syntactic structures has had profound effects, both
intellectually for the study of language and sociologically for the field of linguistic",[44][45] John R. Searle, three decades after his
original review, wrote that "Judged by the objectives stated in the original manifestoes, the revolution has not succeeded. Something else
may have succeeded, or may eventually succeed, but the goals of the original revolution have been altered and in a sense
abandoned."[46] As for LSLT, it would be 17 more years before it saw publication.[47]
Syntactic Structures was the fourth book in the Janua Linguarum series. It was the series's bestselling book. It was reprinted 13 times
until 1978.[48] In 1962, a Russian translation by Konstantin Ivanovich Babisky, titled Синтакси́ ческие структу́ры (Sintaksychyeskiye
Struktury), was published in Moscow.[49] In 1963, Yasuo Isamu wrote a Japanese translation of the book, named Bunpō no kōzō ( 文法の
構造 ).[50] In 1969, a French translation by Michel Braudeau, titled Structures Syntaxiques, was published by Éditions du Seuil in
Paris.[51] In 1973, Mouton published a German translation by Klaus-Peter Lange, titled Strukturen der Syntax.[52] The book has also
been translated into Korean,[53] Spanish,[54] Italian,[55] Czech,[56] Serbo-Croatian[57] and Swedish[58] languages.

Contents

Goals of syntactic investigation

In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky tries to construct a "formalized theory of linguistic structure". He places emphasis on "rigorous
formulations" and "precisely constructed models".[59] In the first chapter of the book, he gives a definition of human language syntax.
He then talks about the goals of syntactic study. For Chomsky, a linguist's goal is to build a grammar of a language. He defines grammar
as a device which produces all the sentences of the language under study. Secondly, a linguist must find the abstract concepts beneath
grammars to develop a general method. This method would help select the best possible device or grammar for any language given its
corpus. Finally, a linguistic theory must give a satisfactory description of all the levels of language analysis. Examples of these levels
include sounds, words and sentence structures.[60]

Grammaticality
The second chapter is titled "The Independence of Grammar". In it,
Chomsky states that a language is "a set ... of sentences, each finite in
length and constructed out of a finite set of elements". A linguist
should separate the "grammatical sequences" or sentences of a
language from the "ungrammatical sequences".[9] By a
"grammatical" sentence Chomsky means a sentence that is intuitively
"acceptable to a native speaker".[9] It is a sentence pronounced with a
"normal sentence intonation". It is also "recall[ed] much more
quickly" and "learn[ed] much more easily".[61]

Chomsky then analyzes further about the basis of "grammaticality."

He shows three ways that do not determine whether a sentence is A tree diagram of the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep
grammatical or not. First, a grammatical sentence need not be furiously"
included in a corpus. Secondly, it need not be meaningful. Finally, it
does not have to be statistically probable. Chomsky shows all three
points using a nonsensical sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."[3] He writes that the sentence is instinctively "grammatical"
to a native English speaker. But it is not included in any known corpus at the time and is neither meaningful nor statistically probable.

Chomsky concludes that "grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning." He adds that "probabilistic models give no particular
insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."[4]

Carnap's influence
British linguist Marcus Tomalin stated that a version of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was suggested decades earlier by Rudolf
Carnap.[62][63] This German philosopher offered in 1934 the pseudo-sentence "Piroten karulieren elatisch".[64] According to American
linguist Reese Heitner, Carnap's sentence showed the autonomy of both syntactic and phonological structures.[note 30]

Grammar models and transformations

In the third chapter titled "An Elementary Linguistic Theory", Chomsky tries to determine what sort of device or model gives an
adequate account of a given set of "grammatical" sentences.[65] Chomsky hypothesizes that this device has to be finite instead of
infinite. He then considers finite state grammar, a communication theoretic model[note 31] which treats language as a Markov process.[66]
Then in the fourth chapter titled "Phrase Structure", he discusses phrase structure grammar, a model based on immediate constituent
analysis.[67] In the fifth chapter titled "Limitations of Phrase Structure Description", he claims to show that both these models are
inadequate for the purpose of linguistic description. As a solution, he introduces transformational generative grammar (TGG), "a more
powerful model ... that might remedy these inadequacies."[10]
Chomsky's transformational grammar has three parts: phrase
structure rules, transformational rules and morphophonemic rules.[68]
The phrase structure rules are used for expanding lexical categories
and for substitutions. These yield a string of morphemes. 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."[8] It "may rearrange strings or may add
or delete morphemes."[69] 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".[68] 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 The grammar model discussed in Noam Chomsky's Syntactic
stage of the grammar, morphophonemic rules convert a string of Structures (1957)
words into a string of phonemes.[69] Chomsky then applies this idea
of transformational rules in the English auxiliary verb system.[70]

Borrowing of terminology
In Syntactic Structures, the term "transformation" was borrowed from the works of Zellig Harris. 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.[71]

Chomsky also borrowed the term "generative" from a previous work of mathematician Emil Post.[note 32] Post wanted to "mechanically
[derive] inferences from an initial axiomatic sentence".[72] Chomsky applied Post's work on logical inference 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"[73]) 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.[note 33]

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".[10] He draws parallels between the theory of language and theories in physical sciences. He compares a finite
corpus of utterances of a particular language to "observations". He likens grammatical rules to "laws" which are stated in terms of
"hypothetical constructs" such as phonemes, phrases, etc.[10] 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"[note 34] (employed in structural linguistics and supposed to automatically and mechanically produce the
correct grammar of a language from a corpus[note 35]). He also dismisses the "decision procedure" (supposed to automatically choose the
best grammar for a language from a set of competing grammars).[74] Chomsky thus shows preference for "explanatory depth" with some
"empirical inadequacies" over the pursuit of very detailed empirical coverage of all data.[note 36]

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 English negative passive 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.[note 37]

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" [sic]. 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 motivations 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.[75]

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".[76]

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."[77] 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".[78] To support his point, Chomsky considers a similar
relation between semantics and phonology. He shows that in order to build a theory of phonemic distinction based on meaning would
entail "complex", "exhaustive" and "laborious investigation" of an "immense", "vast corpus".[79] By contrast, phonemic distinctness can
be easily explained in a "straightforward" way and in "completely non-semantic terms" with the help of "pair tests".[79] Chomsky also
claims that a strictly formal, non-semantic framework of syntactic theory might ultimately be useful to support a parallel independent
semantic theory.[note 38]

Rhetorical style
Randy Allen Harris, a specialist of the rhetoric of science, 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 ... [speaking]
directly 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.[80] 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) to a highly formalized model of language, but also
appeals explicitly and tacitly to the ethos of science.[81]

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".[note 39][note 40][note 41] 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".[82]
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."[83] 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
[Chomsky's] theory". 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".[84]

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 Zellig Harris 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".[85]

Reception

Impact on linguistics
In an early review of the book, American structural linguist Charles F. Voegelin 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"
within linguistics.[86] Another American linguist Martin Joos called the Chomskyan brand of linguistic theory a "heresy" within the
Bloomfieldian tradition.[87] These early remarks proved to be prescient. American linguist Paul Postal commented in 1964 that most of
the "syntactic conceptions prevalent in the United States" were "versions of the theory of phrase structure grammars in the sense of
Chomsky".[88] By 1965, linguists were saying that Syntactic Structures had "mark[ed] an epoch",[89] had a "startling impact"[90] and
created a Kuhnian "revolution".[91] 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."[92] British historian of linguistics R. H. Robins wrote in 1967 that the publication
of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures was "probably the most radical and important change in direction in descriptive linguistics and in
linguistic theory that has taken place in recent years".[93]

Another historian of linguistics Frederick Newmeyer considers Syntactic Structures "revolutionary" for two reasons. Firstly, it showed
that a formal yet non-empiricist theory of language was possible. Chomsky demonstrated this possibility in a practical sense by formally
treating a fragment of English grammar. 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
(i.e. the study of structure and formation of words) and phonology (i.e. the study of organization of sounds in languages) were relegated
in importance.[94]

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".[95]

Impact on other disciplines

Psychology

The generative grammar of Syntactic Structures heralded Chomsky's mentalist perspective in linguistic analysis. Shortly after its
publication, in 1959, Chomsky wrote a critical review[96] of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.[97] Skinner had presented the acquisition of
human language in terms of conditioned responses to outside stimuli and reinforcement. Chomsky opposed this behaviorist 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 reality.[96] Chomsky's argument had a forceful impact on
psycholinguistic research. It changed the course of the discipline in the following years.[note 5]

Philosophy

Syntactic Structures initiated an interdisciplinary dialog between philosophers of language 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 and
psychology".[98] Chomsky and Willard Van Orman Quine, a stridently anti-mentalistic philosopher of language, debated many times on
the merit of Chomsky's linguistic theories.[99] Many philosophers supported Chomsky's idea that natural languages are innate and
syntactically rule-governed. They also believed in the existence of rules in the human mind which bind meanings to utterances. The
investigation of these rules started a new era in philosophical semantics.[note 42][note 43]

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.[note 44] Chomsky's "Three models" paper (Chomsky 1956), 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.[note 45]

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.[100]

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 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.[101]
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".[102][note 46] But he rapidly turned into a fierce critic of Chomskyan
linguistics. By 1966, Hockett rejected "[Chomsky's] frame of reference in almost every detail".[103] 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 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.[note 47] Hockett also opposed Chomsky's hypothesis that
syntax is completely independent of the study of meaning.[104]

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".[105] However, he maintains that Chomsky's linguistics is overly "intuition-based". For him, it relies too much on native
speakers' subjective introspective judgments about their own language. Consequently, language data empirically observed by impersonal
third parties are given less importance.[106]

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.[27] 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.[107]

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".[107] He shows in detail how the approach in Syntactic Structures goes directly back to the work of the
mathematical logician Emil Post on formalizing proof. But "few linguists are aware of this, because Post's papers are not cited."[107]
Pullum adds that the use of formal axiomatic systems to generate probable sentences in language in a top-down manner was first
proposed by Zellig Harris in 1947, ten years before the publication of Syntactic Structures. This is downplayed in Syntactic
Structures.[107]

Necessity of transformations

In 1982, Pullum and another British linguist Gerald Gazdar argued that Chomsky's criticisms of 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.[108][note 48]

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.[note 49]

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.[109]

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.[2]
Notes and references

Notes
1. From Chomsky 1957, p. 103:"...such semantic notions as reference, significance, and synonymity played no role in the
discussion."
2. Chomsky is quoted in Riemsdijk & Huybregts 1982, p. 63 saying: "It [Syntactic Structures] was course notes for an
undergraduate course at MIT. Van Schooneveld [a Dutch linguist who was associated with Mouton] showed up here
once and took a look at some of my course notes from the undergraduate course I was teaching and said I ought to
publish it." In (Dillinger & Palácio 1997, pp. 162–163), Chomsky recounted: "At the time Mouton was publishing just
about anything, so they decided they'd publish it along with a thousand other worthless things that were coming out.
That's the story of Syntactic Structures: course notes for undergraduate science students published by accident in
Europe." The publication of Syntactic structures is also discussed in Noordegraaf 2001 and van Schooneveld 2001.
3. From Chomsky 1957, p. 102: "In §§3-7 we outlined the development of some fundamental linguistic concepts in purely
formal terms."
4. Here, "generate" means giving a clear structural description of each sentence. In Chomsky 1965, p. 9, 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."
5. According to Steinberg, Hiroshi & Aline 2013, p. 371: "[Chomsky's generative system of rules] was more powerful that
anything ... psycholinguists had heretofore had at their disposal. [It] was of special interest to these theorists. Many
psychologists were quick to attribute generative systems to the minds of speakers and quick to abandon ...
Behaviorism."
6. According to Joseph 2002, p. , Hjelmslev and other European linguists, in contrast, had considered the generative
calculus as perfectly non-psychological. See also Hjelmslev 1969
7. Pullum 2011 writes: "[Chomsky] was at the time an unknown 28-year-old who taught language classes at MIT"
8. See the "Reception" section of this article.
9. See the "Criticisms" section of this article.
10. 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
Barsky 1997, p. 10
11. For its similarity to Hebrew. See Barsky 1997, p. 47 and "Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Samuels" ([Link]
[Link]/20101112/). [Link]. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
12. In the 1947 preface of Harris 1951, Zellig Harris writes that “N. Chomsky has given much-needed assistance with the
manuscript."
13. In his preface to Chomsky 1975, 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."
14. Especially Goodman's work on constructional systems and on the inadequacy of inductive approaches. See Chomsky
1975, p. 33. Goldsmith & Huck 1995, p. 24 writes: "Chomsky has said that he was convinced from his days as a student
of Goodman's that there is no inductive learning."
15. Chomsky 1975, p. 33 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."
16. Otero 1994 states that among non-American philosophers, it was only Rudolf Carnap whom Chomsky read as a student
(p. 3)
17. Tomalin 2003 writes that "It is well known that Carnap's post-Aufbau work (especially Logische Syntax der Sprache)
influenced Chomsky directly to some extent."
18. Joseph, Love & Taylor 2001, p. 125 states: "The most significant discontinuity [between Harris's Methods and
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures] is Chomsky's inversion of Harris's analytic procedures."
19. Tomalin 2006, p. 116 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."
20. Chomsky 1951, p. 5 states: "We want the reduction of the number of elements and statements, any generalizations ... to
increase the total simplicity of the grammar"
21. Before Chomsky, Israeli mathematician and linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel had already shown in Bar-Hillel 1953 that
formal languages and methods used in symbolic logic can be adapted to analyze human languages.
22. Chomsky writes in Chomsky 1979, pp. 131–132: "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."
23. 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 (Chomsky 1956). It foreshadows many of the
concepts presented in Syntactic Structures.
24. The series's editor van Schooneveld is quoted thus in Hinrichs 2001, pp. 5–6: "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."
25. According to Hinrichs 2001, p. 7, Peter de Ridder, the managing director of Mouton, wrote to van Schooneveld that "new
titles in the series [should be] no bigger than about 120 pages."
26. A scan of Chomsky's own typewritten letter dated 5 August 1956 to Mouton editor Cornelis van Schooneveld can be
found in Hamans 2014. This letter accompanied the final version of the manuscript.
27. Hinrichs 2001, p. 7 mentions De Ridder writing to van Schooneveld that "I am convinced that the book will sell well with
this title."
28. Oenbring 2009 remarks that Lees's review was "hyperbolic", his language "loaded" and Harris 1993 refers to Lees as
"Chomsky's Huxley", referring to the proselytizing "bulldog" role played by Thomas Henry Huxley in defense of Charles
Darwin's theories on evolution. Voegelin 1958 considers Lees to be "Chomsky's explicator". Chomsky himself considers
Lees's review "provocative." (Chomsky 1975, p. 3)
29. Thorne 1965 remarked that "a revolution of the kind Kuhn describes has recently taken place in linguistics – dating from
the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957". According to Sklar 1968: "What has happened in linguistics
since Chomsky appeared on the scene almost perfectly fits Kuhn's description of how a scientific revolution works."
Searle 1972 writes that "[Chomsky's] revolution followed fairly closely the general pattern described in Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
30. According to Heitner 2005: "[Carnap's sentence] actually does the double duty of demonstrating the "autonomy" of
syntactic and phonological structure, an indication that not only can sentences be recognized as syntactically well-
formed, but individual words can also be recognized as phonologically well-formed independent of semantics."
31. Specifically, the model proposed in Shannon & Weaver 1949
32. In Chomsky 1959, Chomsky writes that he was "following a familiar technical use of the term "generate," cf. Post 1944".
In Chomsky 1965, p. 9, 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."
33. In Chomsky 1965, p. 8, 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."
34. Chomsky 1957, p. 55 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"
35. Sampson 1980, pp. 76 notes that "the fullest and most interesting expression of 'discovery procedure' is [the] book
Methods in Structural Linguistics (Harris 1951) by Zellig Harris, Chomsky's mentor.
36. See Chomsky 1978, pp. 9–10. 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.
37. Chomsky 1957, p. 68 states:"a wide variety of apparently distinct phenomena [in English language] all 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."
38. Because it would "reveal" insights about sentence structures. See Chomsky 1957, p. 103
39. Newmeyer 1987, p. 24 wrote that “[Chomsky’s] examples 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.”
40. According to Brown 2010, p. 188, "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."
41. In his introduction to Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957, p. ix), American linguist David Lightfoot wrote that "this
ingenious transformation...avoided hopelessly complex phrase structure rules and yielded an elegant account... ”
42. Stokhof 2012, p. 548 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."
43. Davidson 1967 writes: "Recent work by Chomsky and others is doing much to bring the complexities of natural
languages within the scope of serious semantic theory".
44. From the preface of Knuth 2003: "... 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."
45. Boden 2006, p. 648 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". Hopcroft & Ullman 1979, p. 9 states that
"Chomsky's notion of a context-free grammar ... has aided immensely the specification of programming languages."
46. 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 Cours de Linguistique Générale in 1916.
47. Hockett 1968, p. 83 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."
48. 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).
49. See the list of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century online here:
[Link]

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Barsky, Robert (2011), Zellig Harris ([Link] Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press
Freidin, Robert (2007), Generative Grammar: Theory and its History, Routledge
Matthews, Peter Hugoe (1993), Grammatical Theory in the United States: From Bloomfield to Chomsky, Cambridge
Studies in Linguistics, vol. 67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Norbert Hornstein; Howard Lasnik; Pritty Patel-Grosz; Charles Yang, eds. (2017), Syntactic Structures after 60 Years:
The Impact of the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics, Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG], vol. 129, De Gruyter
Mouton
Lasnik, Howard (2000), Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory (http
s://[Link]/books/syntactic-structures-revisited), Current Studies in Linguistics, vol. 33, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press

External links
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