Syntactic Structures is a book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. A seminal 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 completely nonsensical.
Read more about Syntactic Structures: Background, Publication, Overview of Topics in Syntactic Structures, Significance, Criticisms, Honor, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words syntactic and/or structures:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)