Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
by Noam Chomsky
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The fiftieth anniversary edition of a landmark work in generative grammar that continues to be influential, with a new preface by the author.Tags
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Groundbreaking book explaining transformational-generative grammar. Very exciting, albeit difficult, read early in my grad school years. As much as I came to disagree with Chomskyan theory, he really did force us all to look at language in very new ways, and to analyze with a rigor unknown to most of us then. This is not to say that the structural linguistics which this book demolished did not have rigor, It certainly did, but it closed off many facets of language, such as semantics. Chomsky also tried to keep language as "pure syntax" with no reference to actual usage, and he was more like the structuralists than he was willing to admit, but what he did was more fluid and fired people up.
This is a groundbreaking work in that it hypothesizes the reason why automated natural language translation may never be done well. For example, no software system is ever likely to be developed that can pass the Turing Test with all its rigor.
La idea de una lingüística internista que se plantea sus problemas como lo hacen las ciencias del mundo natural
Sep 7, 2020Spanish
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Sep 2, 2015French
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580+ Works 47,511 Members
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. Son of a Russian emigrant who was a Hebrew scholar, Chomsky was exposed at a young age to the study of language and principles of grammar. During the 1940s, he began developing socialist political leanings through his encounters with the New York Jewish intellectual show more community. Chomsky received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. He conducted much of his research at Harvard University. In 1955, he began teaching at MIT, eventually holding the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics. Today Chomsky is highly regarded as both one of America's most prominent linguists and most notorious social critics and political activists. His academic reputation began with the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957. Within a decade, he became known as an outspoken intellectual opponent of the Vietnam War. Chomsky has written many books on the links between language, human creativity, and intelligence, including Language and Mind (1967) and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (1985). He also has written dozens of political analyses, including Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Chronicles of Dissent (1992), and The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1993). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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