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)
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)