N oam Chomsky published Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1964.1 The publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 had already sounded like the roll o

On Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

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2021-08-12 00:30:08

N oam Chomsky published Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1964.1 The publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 had already sounded like the roll of distant thunder. A natural language could be studied at the level of explicitness and rigor common in mathematical logic.2 A revolution was in prospect.3 Having heard thunder, linguists were eager to see lightening. They were not disappointed. Aspects consolidated the revolution. Old-fashioned linguists and behavioral psychologists were scattered into exile.

In undertaking a revolution, Chomsky did what revolutionaries often do. He created his own predecessors, Plato and René Descartes among them. Reviving the notion of Universal Grammar from the seventeenth-century Port-Royal grammarians, Chomsky argued that since every human child could learn any human language, a single abstract grammatical system must be the common property of the human race. Syntactic Structures had offered linguists a theory in the sense understood by the serious sciences. In Aspects, the offer was carried forward and justified. Writing almost thirty years later, David Pesetsky struck just the right note:

These are ideas that, in Aspects, Chomsky compelled some linguists to accept: that many have accepted them is a measure of the book’s importance.