Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics,^[1] 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."^[2]

The publishing of Syntactic Structures is believed by many academics to be a watershed moment in the annals of modern linguistics. In a favorable and highly influential review of the book, linguist Robert Lees wrote:

Background

Chomsky had an interest in language and grammar from a very young age. His father William Chomsky was one of the foremost Hebrew grammarians in the world. At the tender 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.^[4] In 1945, sixteen-year-old 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.^[5] In 1947, Chomsky met Zellig Harris, a prominent Bloomfieldian linguist of that time. Harris founded that very year the first ever modern linguistics department of the United States at the University of Pennsylvania. 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. ^[6]

For his undergraduate thesis, Chomsky set off to apply Harris's methods of structural analysis to Hebrew, the language he studied with his father in his childhood. At Harris's suggestion Chomsky began studying logic, philosophy, and 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.

Chomsky continued his studies along these lines as a junior fellow at Harvard, and became interested in developing a linguistic theory using a non-taxonomic approach and based on mathematical formalism, a decisive break from the Bloomfieldian taxonomic structuralist tradition of linguistic analysis. During a productive year at Harvard, he wrote everything he had worked on so far in a gigantic oeuvre comprising close to 1000 typewritten pages, called 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 LSLT would not be published as a book until almost 20 years later in 1975.

Publication

It was not LSLT, but Syntactic Structures that was Chomsky's first ever published book, a short monograph that distilled the concepts presented in LSLT. It was not published in the United States, rather in the Netherlands by a Dutch publishing house, Mouton. In 1956, Chomsky showed his lecture notes for MIT undergraduates to an editor of Mouton^[7] and a revised version of these notes were published as Syntactic Structures in the first week of February, 1957 in the Netherlands.^[8] Favorable reviews from fellow American linguists, like Lees 1957 above, made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic research landscape, and shortly thereafter the book created a revolution 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". ^[9]

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". 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.^[10] 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" over the "discovery procedure" or the "decision procedure".^[11]

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 furiously" 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." ^[12]

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 theoretic 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." In TGG, Chomsky introduces "transformational rules", powerful rewrite rules that can transform "kernel sentences" generated by already known phrase structure rules and give a better linguistic analysis. The term "generative" means the rules provide an explicit and formal description.^[13]

Significance

Linguist John Lyons wrote in 1966: "No work has had a greater influence upon the current linguistic theory than Chomsky's Syntactic Structures."^[14] 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".^[15] 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.^[16]

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".^[17] Chomsky and Willard Van Orman Quine, a strident 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. An investigation of these rules 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 admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon in 1961 and being greatly influenced by it. He found it to be "a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition." ^[18]

Honor

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 online. Syntactic Structures was ranked number one on this list, i.e. the most influential.^[19]

Bibliography

• Barsky, Robert (1997), Noam Chomsky: A life of Dissent, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/ 
• Chomsky, Noam (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague/Paris: Mouton, http://www.google.com/books?id=a6a_b-CXYAkC 
• Chomsky, Noam (1975), "Introduction", The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, New York: Plenum, http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Structure-Linguistic-Theory/dp/030630760X 
• Cook, Vivian (2007), "Chomsky's Syntactic Structures fifty years on", International Journal of Applied Linguistics 17 (1): 120-131, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118505208/abstract 
• Dillinger, Mike; Palacio, Adair (1997), "Lingüística gerativa: Desenvolvimento e Perspectivas uma Entrevista com Noam Chomsky", DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 13, pp. 199-235, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-44501997000300007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=pt  (Portuguese)
• Knuth, Donald (2003), Selected Papers on Computer Languages, CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cl.html 
• Lees, Robert (1957). "Review of Syntactic Structures". Language 33 (3): 375–408. doi:10.2307/411160. http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/lees-rev.pdf. 
• Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1996), Generative Linguistics: A Historical Perspective, Routledge history of linguistic thought series, Routledge, http://books.google.com/books?id=MB8i7owaaNYC 
• Noordegraaf, Jan (2001), "On the publication date of Syntactic Structures: A footnote to Murray 1999", Historiographia Linguistica 28: 225-228, http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/1871/9179/1/syntacticstructures.pdf 
• Robins, R. H. (1967), A Short History of Linguistics, London: Longmans 
• Searle, John R. (1972). "Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics". The New York Review of Books 18 (12). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10142. 
• van Schooneveld, Cornelis H. (2001), "A brief comment re Jan Noordegraaf's "On the publication date of Syntactic Structures"", Historiographia Linguistica 28 (3): 468 

References

1. ^ Lees 1957, Robins 1967, Searle 1972, Newmeyer 1996, and Cook 2007
2. ^ Chomsky 1957:15
3. ^ Lees 1957
4. ^ Barsky 1997: 10
5. ^ Barsky 1997: 47
6. ^ Barsky 1997: 49-50
7. ^ See a scan of Chomsky's own typewritten letter to Mouton editor Cornelis van Schooneveld here: http://bc.ub.leidenuniv.nl/bc/tentoonstelling/mountco/Images/htmpagina/mountco_18.htm
8. ^ There are at least two accounts from Chomsky on this subject. In Chomsky 1975:3, Chomsky writes: "In 1956, at the suggestion of Morris Halle, I showed some of my lecture notes for an undergraduate course at MIT to Cornelis van Schooneveld, the editor of the Janua Linguarum series of Mouton and he offered to publish them. A slightly revised version appeared in 1957, under the title Syntactic Structures." In a more recent interview Dillinger & Palácio 1997:162-163, Chomsky said: "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." Read more about this in Noordegraaf 2001 and van Schooneveld 2001.
9. ^ Chomsky 1957: Preface
10. ^ Chomsky 1957: 49
11. ^ Chomsky 1957: 49-56
12. ^ Chomsky 1957: 17
13. ^ Cook 2007
14. ^ Review of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky. The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 65 (Oct., 1966), pp. 393-395
15. ^ Robins 1967:226
16. ^ Newmeyer 1996: 24-26
17. ^ Searle 1972
18. ^ 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."
19. ^ See the list online here: http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html

External links

• Syntactic Structures preview in Google Books
• 50 years of Syntactic Structures