Syntactic Structures

"Syntactic Structures tells us what that task amounts to and how to go about it. It also gives samples of the kinds of rules we need. Chomsky shows that if you start at a great level of abstraction, and produce many intervening structures on your way to generating the strings that count as sentences, you will have levels of description that allow you to compare the similarities and differences in languages in ways that go beyond simply looking at word order and other surface phenomena. We can say that two languages are similar if the grammars resulting from this project have fundamental similarities at significant computational levels. This is what Chomskians are always looking for – linguistic universals, in the limiting case. What is important for me is that this book brought another piece of the puzzle to the table. By giving us the grammatical part, Chomsky gave us what we need to combine with the meaning part in order to have a complete theory of spoken languages."