Syntactic Structures - Background

Background

Chomsky had an interest in language and grammar from a very young age. His father William Chomsky was one of the foremost Hebrew grammarians 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. At sixteen, Chomsky started his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There during his freshman year, he studied Arabic and was the only student to do so. 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.

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.