Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures

"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, [For example, see Cohn, Neil. 2003. "Visual Syntactic Structures." Emaki Productions. [http://www.emaki.net/essays/VSS1.pdf#search=%22%22syntactic%20structures%22%22] , p. 3.] 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." [Chomsky, Noam. 1957. "Syntactic Structures". The Hague/Paris: Mouton, p. 15.]

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 iscquote|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 languages. [cite journal
last = Lees
first = Robert
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Review of "Syntactic Structures"
journal = Language
volume = 33
issue = 3
pages = 375–408
date = 1957
doi = 10.2307/411160
]

Trivia

* Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading "Syntactic Structures" during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. [From the preface of Knuth's book "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" (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."]

References

External links

* [http://semantics-online.org/2007/02/50-years-of-syntactic-structures 50 years of Syntactic Structures]


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно решить контрольную?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Syntactic ambiguity — For philosophical considerations of ambiguity, see ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity is a property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. Ambiguity may or may not …   Wikipedia

  • Syntactic pattern recognition — or structural pattern recognition is a form of pattern recognition, where items are presented pattern structures which can take into account more complex interrelationships between features than simple numerical feature vectors used in… …   Wikipedia

  • Syntax — Syntactic redirects here. For another meaning of the adjective, see Syntaxis. For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). Linguistics …   Wikipedia

  • MOGUL framework — The MOGUL framework is a research framework aiming to provide a theoretical perspective on the nature of language. MOGUL (Modular On line Growth and Use of Language) draws on the common ground underlying various related areas of cognitive science …   Wikipedia

  • linguistics — /ling gwis tiks/, n. (used with a sing. v.) the science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. [1850 55; see LINGUISTIC, ICS] * * * Study of the nature and structure of… …   Universalium

  • Meaning–text theory — (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk,[1] for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description… …   Wikipedia

  • HEBREW LANGUAGE — This entry is arranged according to the following scheme: pre biblical biblical the dead sea scrolls mishnaic medieval modern period A detailed table of contents precedes each section. PRE BIBLICAL nature of the evidence the sources phonology… …   Encyclopedia of Judaism

  • Linguistic competence — Linguistics …   Wikipedia

  • Noam Chomsky — Chomsky redirects here. For other topics with the same name, see Chomsky (disambiguation). Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky visiting Vancouver, Canada in 2004 …   Wikipedia

  • Linguistics — is the scientific study of language, encompassing a number of sub fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”