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''Syntactic Structures'' is a book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. A seminal〔In Lees 1957, an influential review of ''Syntactic Structures'', linguist Robert Lees wrote that "Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is 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".〕〔Robins 1967〕〔Searle 1972〕〔Newmeyer 1996〕〔Cook 2007〕 work in 20th-century linguistics, it laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar. It contains the famous sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a sentence that is completely grammatical, yet also completely nonsensical.〔Chomsky 1957:15〕 ==Background== Chomsky had an interest in language from a very young age. His father William Chomsky was one of the foremost Hebrew linguists in the world. At the age of twelve, Chomsky read an early form of his father's ''David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar (Mikhlol)'' (1952), an annotated study of a thirteenth-century Hebrew grammar.〔Barsky 1997: 10〕 At sixteen, Chomsky started his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There during his freshman year, he studied Arabic (out of interest in Arab-Jewish cooperation in a binational Palestine)〔personal email 2015-02-18〕 and was the only student to do so.〔Barsky 1997: 47〕 In 1947, the year this university established its linguistics department, Chomsky met Zellig Harris, a prominent Bloomfieldian linguist. Chomsky became very close to Harris and proofread the manuscript of Harris's ''Methods in Structural Linguistics'' (1951). This was Chomsky's introduction to formal, theoretical linguistics and soon he decided to major in the subject.〔Barsky 1997: 49-50〕 For his master's thesis, Chomsky undertook to apply Harris's methods of structural analysis to Hebrew, the language he had studied under his father in childhood. At Harris's suggestion Chomsky began studying logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics. He was particularly influenced by American philosopher Nelson Goodman's work on constructional systems and on the inadequacy of inductive approaches. He found striking similarities between Harris's perspective on language and Goodman's perspective on philosophical systems. Chomsky was equally influenced by American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine's critiques of logical empiricism. In his undergraduate thesis, Chomsky attempted to construct a detailed grammar of Hebrew using Harris' methods. He tried to construct a system of rules for generating the phonetic forms of sentences, and to this end devised a system of recursive rules to describe the form and structure of sentences, organizing the devices in Harris' ''Methods'' differently for this purpose. In particular, Chomsky found that there were many different ways of presenting the grammar. He tried to develop an idea of 'simplicity' for grammars that could be used to sort out the "linguistically significant generalizations" from among the alternative possible sets of grammatical rules. Chomsky finished his master's thesis ''The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew'' in 1951. Having won a one-year junior fellowship at Harvard, Chomsky continued his studies along these lines. More significantly, he became interested in developing a linguistic theory using a non-taxonomic approach and based on mathematical formalism, and this line of inquiry represented a decisive break with the Bloomfieldian taxonomic structuralist tradition of linguistic analysis. During this fellowship, he compiled a gigantic oeuvre, nearly 1000 typewritten pages long, titling it ''The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (''LSLT''). In 1955, with the help of Harris and Roman Jakobson, Chomsky moved to MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) as the in-house linguist in Victor Yngve's mechanical translation project. The same year he submitted just the 9th chapter of ''LSLT'', titled ''Transformational Analysis'', as his doctoral dissertation and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. But it would be 18 more years before ''LSLT'' would see publication. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Syntactic Structures」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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