The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory

By Noam Chomsky

Book Overview

The work written by the noted American linguist two decades ago explains the basic principles of transformational generative grammar, its relation to the general structure of an adequate language... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226104362
• ISBN13: 9780226104362
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Legendary - where it all began...

I have heard this written off, I suspect by people who perhaps haven't read it. Certainly Chomsky himself has more recently both complicated what he wrote here (his emphasis on government and binding theory, which are covered in the book of the same name and also available here), and also simplified. I think that the overcomplication argument is actually invalid, whether or not Chomsky supports this criticism himself, unless one implies that universal grammar can somehow be delineated more simply than a full grammar of any current language (the latest on English is incomplete and still run to over 1,000 pages).I read this as an undergraduate and was absolutely spellbound - his clear division of linguistic structural categories (phonemes, morphemes, words, syntactic categories, phrase structure and, most radically transformations). He was the first person to describe how linguistic competence is generated by a series of transformations; "We take a grammar to be a sequence of statement of the form: - Xi-Yi (i=1,...,N): - interpreted as the instruction "rewrite Xi as Yi", where Xi and Yi are strings". Actually, the rest is reiteration and amplification - how simple can you get? (Except for those people for whom even this is too "mathematical" - but there is no hope for these.)The first three chapters remain essential reading - and remember that this was presented as his thesis and was initially rejected simply because there was no-one competent enough to review it! Imagine rewriting linguistics in your thesis!It seems a shame that he is probably now better known for his political writings, cogent and urgent as these are. If you are looking for a rigorous, complex, blazingly original rewriting of grammar, of language, of the idea of linguistic generation, and a precursor for all his later ideas on linguistic acquisition devices and universal grammars, from the man who rewrites linguistics with every publication and, like Wittgenstein before him, forces others in the field to rethink their whole paradigms regularly...(like Wittgenstein before him) - Chomsky's your man. Read the first three chapters, even if (especially if!) you aren't a linguist - I'm not, and it changed the way I think. (Can you tell I'm a fan?) I haven't nearly done it justice, but I couldn't believe there had been no reviews of this.