Syntactic Structures

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Mouton de Gruyter, 2002 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 117 pages
Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our 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; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

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Contents

Introduction
11
The Independence of Grammar
13
An Elementary Linguistic Theory
18
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Noam Chomsky is Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. David W. Lightfoot is Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.