Syntactic Structures

Noam Chomsky is Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.David W. Lightfoot is Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.

"Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields. It is 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 rather a rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicit measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar."Robert B. Lees in : 'Language' "I had already decided I wanted to be a linguist when I discovered this book. But it is unlikely that I would have stayed in the field without it. It has been the single most inspiring book on linguistics in my whole career." HenkvanRiemsdijk

• Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Independence of Grammar -- 3. An elementary Linguistic Theory -- 4. Phrase Structure -- 5. Limitations of Phrase Structure Description -- 6. On the Goals of Linguistic Theory -- 7. Some Transformations in English -- 8. The explanatory Power of Linguistic Theory -- 9. Syntax and Semantics -- 10. Summary -- 11. Appendix I. Notations and Terminology -- 12. Appendix II. Examples of English Phrase Structure and transformational Rules -- Backmatter