Syntactic Structures
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Syntactic Structures is the name of an influential book by Noam Chomsky first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar. The book contains the well-known example of a sentence that is completely grammatical, yet completely nonsensical in "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
The publishing of Syntactic Structures is believed by many academics to be a watershed moment in the annals of modern linguistics. In a review of the book, linguist Robert Lees wrote that the book is
- "One of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields. It's not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalog, nor another speculative philosophy about the nature of Man and Language, but a rather rigorous explanation of our intuitions about language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages.
The paradigm of Bloomfieldean Linguistics in American linguistics was replaced by the paradigm of generative semantics with the publishing of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957.
