Syntactic Structures

by Noam Chomsky

“Syntactic Structures is a major work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky. It was first published in 1957. It introduced the idea of transformational generative grammar. This was a fully formal approach to syntax (the study of sentence structures). At its base, this method uses phrase structure rules. These rules break down sentences into smaller parts. Chomsky then combines these with a new kind of rules called “transformations”. This procedure gives rise to different sentence structures. Using this limited set of rules, Chomsky aimed to “generate” all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language, which are unlimited in number.” —Wikipedia