Syntactic Structures
Encyclopedia
Syntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics
by American linguist Noam Chomsky
, first published in 1957. 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.
was one of the foremost Hebrew grammarians in the world. At the age of twelve, Chomsky read an early form of his father's David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar (Mikhlol) (1952), an annotated study of a thirteenth-century Hebrew grammar. At sixteen, Chomsky started his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania
. There during his freshman year, he studied Arabic and was the only student to do so. In 1947, the year this university established its linguistics department
, Chomsky met Zellig Harris
, a prominent Bloomfieldian
linguist. Chomsky became very close to Harris and proofread the manuscript of Harris's Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951). This was Chomsky's introduction to formal, theoretical linguistics
and soon he decided to major in the subject.
For his master's thesis, Chomsky undertook to apply Harris's methods of structural analysis to Hebrew, the language he had studied under his father in childhood. At Harris's suggestion Chomsky began studying logic
, philosophy
, and the foundations of mathematics
. He was particularly influenced by American philosopher Nelson Goodman
's work on constructional systems and on the inadequacy of inductive approaches. He found striking similarities between Harris's perspective on language and Goodman's perspective on philosophical systems. Chomsky was equally influenced by American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine
's critiques of logical empiricism. In his undergraduate thesis, Chomsky attempted to construct a detailed grammar of Hebrew using Harris' methods. He tried to construct a system of rules for generating the phonetic forms of sentences, and to this end devised a system of recursive rules to describe the form and structure of sentences, organizing the devices in Harris' Methods differently for this purpose. In particular, Chomsky found that there were many different ways of presenting the grammar. He tried to develop an idea of 'simplicity' for grammars that could be used to sort out the "linguistically significant generalizations" from among the alternative possible sets of grammatical rules. Chomsky finished his master's thesis The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951.
Having won a one year junior fellowship at Harvard
, Chomsky continued his studies along these lines. More significantly, he became interested in developing a linguistic theory using a non-taxonomic
approach and based on mathematical formalism, and this line of inquiry represented a decisive break with the Bloomfieldian taxonomic structuralist tradition of linguistic analysis. During this fellowship, he compiled a gigantic oeuvre, nearly 1000 typewritten pages long, titling it The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT).
In 1955, with the help of Harris and Roman Jakobson
, Chomsky moved to MIT
's Research Laboratory of Electronics
(RLE) as the in-house linguist in Victor Yngve
's mechanical translation project. The same year he submitted just the 9th chapter of LSLT, titled Transformational Analysis, as his doctoral dissertation and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. But it would be 18 more years before LSLT would see publication.
that distilled the concepts presented in LSLT. It was published by a Dutch publishing house, Mouton. In 1956, Chomsky showed an editor at Mouton his lecture notes for MIT undergraduates and a revised version of these notes were published as Syntactic Structures in the first week of February, 1957. Favorable reviews from fellow American linguists, e.g., Robert Lees, made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic research landscape, and shortly thereafter the book created a revolution
in the discipline.
which is supposed to automatically produce the correct grammar of a language from a corpus) or the "decision procedure" (a procedure which is supposed to automatically choose the best grammar for a language from a set of competing grammars).
" and says that even though the sentence is grammatical, 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, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."
model based on a conception of language as a Markov process
. Then he discusses phrase structure grammar
, a model based on immediate constituent analysis
. He shows that both these models are inadequate for the purpose of linguistic description and as a solution, proposes his own formal theory of syntax called transformational generative grammar (TGG), "a more powerful model combining phrase structure and grammatical transformations that might remedy these inadequacies."
A transformational grammar has a "natural tripartite arrangement": phrase structure rules, transformational rules and morphophonemic rules. The phrase structure rules are used for the expansion of grammatical categories
and for substitutions. These yield a string of morpheme
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", which 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
s.
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky invented the term "generative" and used it in a particular technical sense. When he says a finite set of rules "generate" 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.
wrote 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". 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." Prominent 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". 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 and more importantly, it 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. As a result, morphology and phonology were relegated in importance.
Syntactic Structures also introduced Chomsky's mentalist
perspective in linguistic analysis. This had a massive influence on the psychological study of language
. Before Syntactic Structures, psychologists treated human language in terms of conditioned responses to outside stimuli and reinforcement. Chomsky argued that humans produce language using separate syntactic and semantic components inside the mind, and presented TGG as a coherent abstract description of this phenomenon. This induced a flurry of psycholinguistic research in the following decades.
Syntactic Structures also initiated an interdisciplinary dialog between philosophers of language
and linguists. American philosopher John Searle
wrote that "Chomsky's work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era, comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has done more than simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a new discipline of generative grammar and is having a revolutionary effect on two other subjects, philosophy and psychology". Chomsky and Willard Van Orman Quine, a stridently anti-mentalistic philosopher of language and one of Chomsky's early influences, debated many times on the merit of Chomsky's linguistic theories. Most philosophers supported Chomsky's idea that natural languages are innate and syntactically rule-governed. In addition, they thought that there also exist rules in the human mind which bind meanings to utterances. The investigation of what these rules might be started a new era in philosophical semantics.
With its formal and logical treatment of language, Syntactic Structures also brought linguistics and the new field of computer science
closer together. Renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth
has recounted he read Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon in 1961 and was greatly influenced by it.
, American linguist Charles Hockett considered Syntactic Structures one of "only four major breakthroughs in modern linguistics", alongside 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. But he rapidly turned into a fierce critic of Chomskyan linguistics. By 1966, Hockett rejected "[Chomsky's] frame 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, claiming 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 ill-defined. In Hockett's view, "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 decried Chomsky's principle that syntax is completely independent of semantics.
Another long-standing critic of Chomskyan linguistics, the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson
, maintains that Chomsky's linguistics is intuition-based and non-empirical, and that it largely owes its good fortune of becoming the dominant theoretical paradigm in the following years to the charisma of Chomsky's intellect. Sampson notes that there are many references in Syntactic Structures to Chomsky's own 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.
'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 the century.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
by American linguist Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar
Transformational grammar
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the Chomskyan tradition of phrase structure grammars...
. It contains the famous sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory"...
", which Chomsky offered as an example of a sentence that is completely grammatical, yet completely nonsensical.
Background
Chomsky had an interest in language and grammar from a very young age. His father William ChomskyWilliam Chomsky
William Chomsky was an American scholar of Hebrew, born in Russia , who was a professor at Gratz College. He was made faculty president of Gratz in 1932, a position that he held for thirty seven years. He also taught at Dropsie College, a graduate school of Jewish and Semitic studies from 1955...
was one of the foremost Hebrew grammarians in the world. At the age of twelve, Chomsky read an early form of his father's David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar (Mikhlol) (1952), an annotated study of a thirteenth-century Hebrew grammar. At sixteen, Chomsky started his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
. There during his freshman year, he studied Arabic and was the only student to do so. In 1947, the year this university established its linguistics department
Academic department
An academic department is a division of a university or school faculty devoted to a particular academic discipline. This article covers United States usage at the university level....
, Chomsky met Zellig Harris
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...
, a prominent Bloomfieldian
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...
linguist. Chomsky became very close to Harris and proofread the manuscript of Harris's Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951). This was Chomsky's introduction to formal, theoretical linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and soon he decided to major in the subject.
For his master's thesis, Chomsky undertook to apply Harris's methods of structural analysis to Hebrew, the language he had studied under his father in childhood. At Harris's suggestion Chomsky began studying logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, and the foundations of mathematics
Foundations of mathematics
Foundations of mathematics is a term sometimes used for certain fields of mathematics, such as mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, proof theory, model theory, type theory and recursion theory...
. He was particularly influenced by American philosopher Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
's work on constructional systems and on the inadequacy of inductive approaches. He found striking similarities between Harris's perspective on language and Goodman's perspective on philosophical systems. Chomsky was equally influenced by American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
's critiques of logical empiricism. In his undergraduate thesis, Chomsky attempted to construct a detailed grammar of Hebrew using Harris' methods. He tried to construct a system of rules for generating the phonetic forms of sentences, and to this end devised a system of recursive rules to describe the form and structure of sentences, organizing the devices in Harris' Methods differently for this purpose. In particular, Chomsky found that there were many different ways of presenting the grammar. He tried to develop an idea of 'simplicity' for grammars that could be used to sort out the "linguistically significant generalizations" from among the alternative possible sets of grammatical rules. Chomsky finished his master's thesis The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951.
Having won a one year junior fellowship at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Chomsky continued his studies along these lines. More significantly, he became interested in developing a linguistic theory using a non-taxonomic
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
approach and based on mathematical formalism, and this line of inquiry represented a decisive break with the Bloomfieldian taxonomic structuralist tradition of linguistic analysis. During this fellowship, he compiled a gigantic oeuvre, nearly 1000 typewritten pages long, titling it The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT).
In 1955, with the help of Harris and Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
, Chomsky moved to MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
's Research Laboratory of Electronics
Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT
The Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1946 as the successor to the famed MIT Radiation Laboratory of World War II....
(RLE) as the in-house linguist in Victor Yngve
Victor Yngve
Victor Yngve is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages...
's mechanical translation project. The same year he submitted just the 9th chapter of LSLT, titled Transformational Analysis, as his doctoral dissertation and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. But it would be 18 more years before LSLT would see publication.
Publication
Syntactic Structures was Chomsky's first published book, a short monographMonograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
that distilled the concepts presented in LSLT. It was published by a Dutch publishing house, Mouton. In 1956, Chomsky showed an editor at Mouton his lecture notes for MIT undergraduates and a revised version of these notes were published as Syntactic Structures in the first week of February, 1957. Favorable reviews from fellow American linguists, e.g., Robert Lees, made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic research landscape, and shortly thereafter the book created a revolution
Paradigm shift
A Paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within the ruling theory of science...
in the discipline.
Overview of topics in Syntactic Structures
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky tries to construct a "formalized theory of linguistic structure" and places emphasis on "rigorous formulations" and "precisely constructed models".Justification of grammars
Chomsky writes that his "fundamental concern" is "the problem of justification of grammars". He defines "a grammar of the language L" as "essentially a theory of L", as well as "a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones". Talking about the goals of linguistic theory, he draws parallels to theories in physical sciences. He compares a finite corpus of utterances of a particular language to "observations", grammatical rules to "laws" which are stated in terms of "hypothetical constructs" such as phonemes, phrases, etc. According to Chomsky, the criteria for the "justification of grammars" are "external conditions of adequacy", "condition of generality" and "simplicity". To choose which is the best grammar for a given corpus of a given language, Chomsky shows his preference for the "evaluation procedure" (which chooses the best possible grammar for a language against the aforementioned criteria) over the "discovery procedure" (a procedure employed in structural linguisticsStructural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
which is supposed to automatically produce the correct grammar of a language from a corpus) or the "decision procedure" (a procedure which is supposed to automatically choose the best grammar for a language from a set of competing grammars).
Grammaticality
According to 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 and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences." By "grammatical" Chomsky means "acceptable to a native speaker". Analyzing further about the basis of grammaticality, Chomsky shows three ways that do not determine whether a sentence is grammatical or not: its inclusion in a corpus, it being meaningful, and it being statistically probable. To illustrate his point, Chomsky presents a nonsensical sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslyColorless green ideas sleep furiously
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory"...
" and says that even though the sentence is grammatical, 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, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."
Grammar models
Assuming that a set of "grammatical" sentences of a language has been given, Chomsky then tries to figure out what sort of device or model gives an adequate account of this set of utterances. To this end, he first discusses finite state grammar, a communication theoreticA Mathematical Theory of Communication
"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential 1948 article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon. As of November 2011, Google Scholar has listed more than 48,000 unique citations of the article and the later-published book version...
model based on a conception of language as a Markov process
Markov process
In probability theory and statistics, a Markov process, named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov, is a time-varying random phenomenon for which a specific property holds...
. Then he discusses phrase structure grammar
Phrase structure grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammars as defined by phrase structure rules, i.e. rewrite rules of the type studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue...
, a model based on immediate constituent analysis
Immediate constituent analysis
In linguistics, immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis is a method of sentence analysis that was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield and developed further by Rulon Wells. The process reached a full blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the early works of Noam Chomsky. The...
. He shows that both these models are inadequate for the purpose of linguistic description and as a solution, proposes his own formal theory of syntax called transformational generative grammar (TGG), "a more powerful model combining phrase structure and grammatical transformations that might remedy these inadequacies."
A transformational grammar has a "natural tripartite arrangement": phrase structure rules, transformational rules and morphophonemic rules. The phrase structure rules are used for the expansion of grammatical categories
Lexical category
In grammar, a part of speech is a linguistic category of words , which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others...
and for substitutions. These yield a string of morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
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", which 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
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s.
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky invented the term "generative" and used it in a particular technical sense. When he says a finite set of rules "generate" 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.
Significance
American linguist Paul PostalPaul Postal
Paul Martin Postal is an American linguist and member of the faculty of New York University.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...
wrote 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". British linguist John Lyons
John Lyons (linguist)
Sir John Lyons, LittD, FBA is an English linguist, most famous for his work on semantics.John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, and at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954. After doing his national service in...
wrote in 1966 that "no work has had a greater influence upon the current linguistic theory than Chomsky's Syntactic Structures." Prominent historian of linguistics R. H. Robins
R. H. Robins
Professor Robert H. Robins , 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 School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.Robin's work in...
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". Another historian of linguistics Frederick Newmeyer
Frederick Newmeyer
Frederick J. Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University Department of Linguistics...
considers Syntactic Structures "revolutionary" for two reasons. Firstly, it showed that a formal yet non-empiricist theory of language was possible and more importantly, it 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. As a result, morphology and phonology were relegated in importance.
Syntactic Structures also introduced Chomsky's mentalist
Mentalism (philosophy)
In philosophy of mind, mentalism is the view that the mind and mental states exist as causally efficacious inner states of persons. The view should be distinguished from substance dualism, which is the view that the mind and the body are two distinct kinds of things which nevertheless interact ...
perspective in linguistic analysis. This had a massive influence on the psychological study of language
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
. Before Syntactic Structures, psychologists treated human language in terms of conditioned responses to outside stimuli and reinforcement. Chomsky argued that humans produce language using separate syntactic and semantic components inside the mind, and presented TGG as a coherent abstract description of this phenomenon. This induced a flurry of psycholinguistic research in the following decades.
Syntactic Structures also initiated an interdisciplinary dialog between philosophers of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
and linguists. American philosopher John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
wrote that "Chomsky's work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era, comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has done more than simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a new discipline of generative grammar and is having a revolutionary effect on two other subjects, philosophy and psychology". Chomsky and Willard Van Orman Quine, a stridently anti-mentalistic philosopher of language and one of Chomsky's early influences, debated many times on the merit of Chomsky's linguistic theories. Most philosophers supported Chomsky's idea that natural languages are innate and syntactically rule-governed. In addition, they thought that there also exist rules in the human mind which bind meanings to utterances. The investigation of what these rules might be started a new era in philosophical semantics.
With its formal and logical treatment of language, Syntactic Structures also brought linguistics and the new field of computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
closer together. Renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
has recounted he read Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon in 1961 and was greatly influenced by it.
Criticism
In his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of AmericaLinguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
, American linguist Charles Hockett considered Syntactic Structures one of "only four major breakthroughs in modern linguistics", alongside Sir William Jones's address to the Asiatic Society in 1786, Karl Verner
Karl Verner
Karl Verner was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he discovered in 1875.Verner, whose interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Christian Rask, began his university studies in 1864. He studied Oriental, Germanic and Slavic languages,...
's Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung in 1875 and Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's Cours de Linguistique Générale
Course in General Linguistics
Course in General Linguistics is an influential book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye that is based on notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva between the years 1906 and 1911...
in 1916. But he rapidly turned into a fierce critic of Chomskyan linguistics. By 1966, Hockett rejected "[Chomsky's] frame 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, claiming 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 ill-defined. In Hockett's view, "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 decried Chomsky's principle that syntax is completely independent of semantics.
Another long-standing critic of Chomskyan linguistics, the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex....
, maintains that Chomsky's linguistics is intuition-based and non-empirical, and that it largely owes its good fortune of becoming the dominant theoretical paradigm in the following years to the charisma of Chomsky's intellect. Sampson notes that there are many references in Syntactic Structures to Chomsky's own 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.
Honor
In 2000, University of MinnesotaUniversity of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
's Center for Cognitive Sciences compiled a list of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
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 the century.
Further reading
- Pullum, Geoffrey K. (forthcoming) On the mathematics of Syntactic Structures. To appear in Journal of Logic, Language and Information. PDF format (18 pages)