Noam Chomsky
A ninety-page book by a twenty-eight-year-old MIT teacher reshaped linguistics. Reading Syntactic Structures (1957) — from "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" through the transformations behind negation, questions, and the passive, to structural ambiguity.
Reading Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957): Grammar Is Independent of Meaning
A young MIT teacher changed the landscape of linguistics with a slim, ninety-page book. You can't define a "grammatical sentence" by appeal to meaning, and you can't define it by appeal to probability either — so what do you appeal to? The book rejects a finite-state model, shows the limits of a phrase-structure model, and proposes a third model: the transformation. Read alongside "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Syntactic Structures, in Plain Words
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a strange sentence — but it feels grammatical. Why? Following the question Chomsky's small book asked, with no jargon.
Nine Ideas from Syntactic Structures, One at a Time
From "what is a sentence" to "what should a theory aim at." The argument of Syntactic Structures, taken apart one piece at a time, each with a short example.
"Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously": Grammar Is Neither Meaning Nor Probability
Why can't a machine that predicts each word from the last one ever generate English? Reading chapters 2-3 of Syntactic Structures through a concrete, nested example.
The Limits of Phrase Structure: Why the Passive Can't Be a Rewrite Rule
Phrase structure — sentences as boxes inside boxes — is stronger than the finite-state model. But conjunction, discontinuous auxiliaries, and the passive expose its limits. Reading chapters 4-5 of Syntactic Structures.
Negation, Questions, and Do: One Analysis Explains Them All
Where does the "do" in "did they arrive" come from? Why is there no inversion in "who ate an apple"? Reading the transformational machinery of chapter 7 of Syntactic Structures, one derivation at a time.
"The Shooting of the Hunters": Structural Ambiguity and the Autonomy of Syntax
Why can the same-looking sentence be understood in two different ways? And can grammar really be built without leaning on meaning? Reading chapters 8-9 of Syntactic Structures.