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 philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)