Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1957.

This slim volume, first published in 1957 and occasionally reprinted since then, has attracted surprisingly little attention in linguistic circles. It is unfortunate that this is the case, for in the book Chomsky proposes a truly innovative approach to syntactic problems which have plagued linguists since the days of Bloomfield. Essentially, Chomsky proposes that actual utterances should be understood as surface structures which have been derived from more basic deep structures by means of transformations. For instance, the sentence “Sir Egbert was devoured by the dragon” (my example, not Chomsky’s; I can’t remember any of his), is derived from the sentence “The dragon devoured Sir Egbert” through application of the Passive transformation. The application of this, or any transformational rule can be described by a very formal-looking “structural analysis” and “structural change.” I’m not sure what use this rigid symbolic apparatus is, but it does make the theory seem scientific.

Chomsky himself is currently enjoying comfortable obscurity as a tenured professor of linguistics at MIT, where he is perhaps more famous for his stamp collection than his linguistic theories. Not to belittle his philatelic treasure trove—I’ve seen it, and it really is nice—I nonetheless hope that enough people will read this book soon to make Chomsky the most noted linguist of our day, if not for his own sake, then for the sake of our currently uninspired science.

Robert E. Lee

Washington and Lee University

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