Syntactic Structures

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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,[1] this work criticized the then-popular behaviorist theories of B.F. Skinner and others and also laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar. The book contains the notorious example of a sentence that is completely grammatical, yet completely nonsensical in "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."[2]

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 lanaguages.[3] ”

  1. ^ For example, see Cohn, Neil. 2003. "Visual Syntactic Structures." Emaki Productions. [1], p. 3.
  2. ^ Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton, p. 15.
  3. ^ Lees, Robert (1957). "Review of Syntactic Structures". Language 33 (3): 375–408. 

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Noam Chomsky
Bibliography (incomplete)
Linguistics: Syntactic Structures (1957) • Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) • The Sound Pattern of English (1968) • The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975) • Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) • The Minimalist Program (1995)
Politics: The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967) • American Power and the New Mandarins • Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship • The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983) • Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward Herman, 1988) • Necessary Illusions (1989) • Deterring Democracy (1992) • Class Warfare (1996) • Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (2003) • Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006)
Filmography
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) • Last Party 2000 (2001) • Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (2002) • Distorted Morality — America's War On Terror? (2003) • Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV, 2003) • The Corporation (2003) • Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land (2004)
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