Syntactic-Structure,Chomsky

vi Introduction by David W. Lightfoot Introduction by David W. Lightfoot vii
nothing on cognitive representations, nothing on grammars as mental
systems triggered by childhood exposure to initial linguistic experiences.
Chomsky arrived at some conclusions and developed some lines
of thought which naturally provoked a radical re-thinking of the status
of grammatical descriptions, but, to judge from the earliest texts, it
appears that he did this without any particular concern for cognitive
representations.
The best discussion of these early years is the introduction to the
version of the dissertation which was published in 1975 ( The logical
structure of linguistic theory, henceforth LSLT). There Chomsky, writing
in 1973, said that there would have been little notice of Syntactic
Structures in the profession if Robert Lees had not written an extensive
review, published in Language more or less simultaneously with the
appearance of the book. But that review touched only briefly on the
matter of mental representations. Furthermore, Chomsky's judgement
may be too modest; the book was well-received in a number of reviews,
and the work had a major impact quickly, notably through
Chomsky's presentation at the Third Texas Conference in 1958 (published
as Chomsky 1962), although not everything went smoothly: the
dissertation was rejected for publication by the Technology Press of
MIT and an article was rejected by the journal Word.
Syntactic Structures itself consisted of lecture notes for undergraduate
classes at MIT, which C. H. van Schooneveld offered to publish
with Mouton, "a sketchy and informal outline of some of the material
in LSLT" (Chomsky 1975: 3). So these are the three central texts from
this period: LSLT, Syntactic Structures, and Lees' review. It is also
useful to look at the earliest analytical work of the new paradigm:
Klima (1964), Lees (1960) and (Lees and Klima 1963), for example.
However, one should keep in mind in addition that Chomsky was
working on his review of Skinner's acclaimed Verbal behavior (Chomsky
1959); the review was submitted in 1957 and sketched a way of
looking at psychological behavior quite different from the prevailing
orthodoxies.
The book was "part of an attempt to construct a formalized general
theory of linguistic structure ... by pushing a precise but inadequate
formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the
exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding
of the linguistic data" (p.5). This was a foretaste of a
strategy that Chomsky has pursued throughout his career, always willing
to formulate proposals in accurate detail in order to see where
the weaknesses lie, then reformulating, sometimes in radical fashion,
moving much snow on the mountainside; one thinks of the filters of
Chomsky and Lasnik (1977), the indexing conventions in the appendix
of Chomsky (1980), and the features of Chomsky (1995: ch.4), which
sought precision over elegance and biological plausibility and then
gave rise to major reformulations of linguistic theory. The immediate
goal of the new work was to formulate precise, explicit, "generative"
accounts, free of intuition-bound notions.
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. The grammar of L
will thus be a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L
and none of the ungrammatical ones. (p.13)1
Lees and others were impressed with the outline of what they took to
be a truly scientific perspective, and these were days of much concern
about the nature of science. Lees viewed the book as
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 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 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. (Lees 1957: 377-8)
Chomsky begins Syntactic Structures, then, by aiming to construct
a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the
sentences of the language under analysis. More generally, linguists must be
concerned with the problem of determining the fundamental underlying
properties of successful grammars. The ultimate outcome of these investigations
should be a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive
devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly,
with no specific reference to particular languages. One function of
this theory is to provide a general method for selecting a grammar for each
language, given a corpus of sentences of this language. (p.11)