Syntactic-Structure,Chomsky

x by David W. Lightfoot Introduction by David W. Lightfoot xi
that "the grammar is materially simplified when we add a transformational
level, since it is now necessary to provide phrase structure directly
only for kernel sentences" (p.47).
Chapter 7, entitled Some transformations in English, extended transformational
analysis to negative, interrogative and other sentencetypes,
yielding further simplifications over pure phrase structure grammars.
The transformations themselves provided evidence for certain
constituents (p.83) and the same units recurred in a number of operations,
suggesting that genuine generalizations were being captured.
The fundamental aspects of the analysis of auxiliaries have survived
extensive discussion of almost 50 years. In current formulations a
central parameter of grammatical variation lies in how verbs may be
connected to their tense markers, either as a result of a syntactic operation
raising a verb to a higher functional category containing the tense
marker (as in French, cf. Emonds 1978) or what is now seen as a
morphological operation lowering the tense marker on to an adjacent
verb (as in modern English, cf. Lightfoot 1993, Baker 2002), Chomsky's
(1957) Auxiliary Transformation — Lasnik (2000) offers detailed
discussion of this distinction and its relation to the proposals of Syntactic
Structures.
Always concerned to formulate as precisely as possible, Chomsky
pointed out that the analysis entailed an ordering in the application
of transformational rules (p.44) and a distinction between optional
and obligatory rules (p.45). That yields precision but also problems, if
one views grammars as acquired by children exposed only to primary
data. If two rules must be ordered or if a rule needs to be classified as
obligatory, then somebody viewing grammars as aspects of mature
cognition would wonder how that could be triggered in a child. If the
two rules are misordered or if an obligatory rule applies optionally,
the grammar would generate non-occurring sentences or structures.
Those non-occurring sentences constitute the linguist's evidence for the
ordering or the obligatory character of rules, but that evidence is not
available to young children. If the sentences don't occur, they can't be
part of the primary data, not part of what a child experiences, and
we have a grammar which cannot be triggered and is "unlearnable".
However, this was not an issue in 1957, when precision was the overriding
goal and matters of learnability had not yet been raised explicitly.
The last substantive chapter of Syntactic Structures deals with syntax
and semantics, a relationship which has been widely misunderstood.
Chomsky argued that grammars are autonomous and independent
of meaning in the sense that their primitives are not defined in
semantic terms (p.17). That "should not, however, blind us to the fact
that there are striking correspondences between the structures and elements
that are discovered in formal, grammatical analysis and specific
semantic functions" (p.101). So the units of syntactic analysis, syntactic
constituents, are almost identical to the units of semantic analysis:
the ambiguity of I saw the man with a telescope is reflected in two
syntactic structures, one where a man with a telescope is a constituent
and one where it is not. The work assumes a use-theory of meaning, that
grammars are embedded in a broader semiotic theory which USES the
grammar to determine the meaning and reference of expressions. There
are striking correspondences between syntactic and semantic properties
and the study of "the structure of language as an instrument may
be expected to provide insight into the actual use of language" (p.103);
to argue that syntactic primitives are not defined semantically is not
to deny connections between form and meaning (for discussion, see
LSLT, 18-23 and Lees 1957: 393-5).
Syntactic Structures, of course, reflected the ambient intellectual culture
of the mid-1950s in some ways. Chomsky offered operational definitions
of well-formed sentences of a kind that a behaviorist psychologist
could understand: they did not need to be "meaningful" or "significant"
in any semantic sense (p.15), not statistically frequent; they
could be read with normal intonation contours, recalled readily, and
learned quickly. He carried over the notion of KERNEL sentences from
his teacher Zellig Harris (1951), reformulating the notion as referring
to sentences which had undergone no optional, only obligatory transformations
(p.45); LSLT (41-45) offers detailed discussion of the relation
between Harris' transformations and Chomsky's early work. Indeed,
one might argue that Syntactic Structures reflected existing practice
in its silence on matters of cognition: there is reason to believe that
structuralists were concerned with matters of cognition and wanted
analyses which were psychologically plausible, but the concern was
implicit.
The methodological innovations have endured, and likewise many
of the technical proposals. Chomsky (1995) has revived the distinction
between singulary and generalized transformations, the former affecting
single structures and the latter embedding clauses within other
structures. That distinction was abandoned after Syntactic Structures,