Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (known in linguistic circles simply as AspectsSee Gallego and Ott 2015) is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics.Gallego and Ott 2015 : 249 It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal (i.e. based on the manipulation of symbols and rules) discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.
Background After the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, the nature of linguistic research began to change, especially at MIT and elsewhere in the linguistic community where TGG had a favorable reception. Morris Halle, a student of Roman Jacobson and a colleague of Chomsky at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), was a strong supporter of Chomsky's ideas of TGG. At first Halle worked on a generative phonology of Russian and published his work in 1959.Halle 1959 From 1956 until 1968, together with Chomsky (and also with Fred Lukoff initially), Halle developed a new theory of phonology called generative phonology. Their collaboration culminated with the publication of The Sound Pattern of English in 1968. Robert Lees, a linguist of the traditional structuralist school, went to MIT in 1956 to work in the mechanical translation project at RLE, but became convinced by Chomsky's TGG approach and went on to publish, in 1960, probably the very first book of a linguistic analysis based on TGG entitled The Grammar of English Nominalizations. This work was preceded by Lees's doctoral thesis on the same topic, for which he was given a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Lees was technically the first student of the new TGG paradigm. Edward S. Klima, a graduate of the Masters program from Harvard and hired by Chomsky at RLE in 1957, produced pioneering TGG-based work on negation.Klima 1964 In 1959, Chomsky wrote a critical review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) in the journal Language, in which he emphasized on the fundamentally human characteristic of verbal creativity, which is present even in very young children, and rejected the behaviorist way of describing language in ambiguous terms such as "stimulus", "response", "habit", "conditioning", and "reinforcement".Chomsky 1959
With Morris Halle and others, Chomsky founded the graduate program in linguistics at MIT in 1961. The program immediately attracted some of the brightest young American linguists. Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz, both graduates of the Ph.D. program at Princeton, and Paul Postal, a Ph.D. from Yale, were some of the first students of this program. They made major contributions to the nascent field of TGG. John Viertel, a colleague of Chomsky at RLE in the 1950s, began working for a Ph.D. dissertation under Chomsky on the linguistic thoughts of Wilhelm von Humboldt, a nineteenth-century German linguist. Viertel's English translations of Humboldt's works influenced Chomsky at this time and made him abandon Saussurian views of linguistics.In Chomsky 1970:23, Chomsky writes that "Modern linguistics is much under the influence of Saussure's conception of langue as an inventory of elements and his preoccupation with systems of elements rather than the systems of rules which were the focus of attention in traditional grammar and in the general linguistics of Humboldt." Chomsky also collaborated with visiting French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, and was able to formulate one of the most important theorems of formal linguistics, the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy. Within the theoretical framework of TGG, G. H. Matthews, Chomsky's colleague at RLE, worked on the grammar of Hidatsa, a Native American language. J. R. Applegate worked on the German noun phrase. Lees and Klima looked into English pronominalization. Matthews and Lees worked on the German verb phrase.Yngve 1956. On the nature of the linguistic research at MIT in those days, Jerry Fodor recalls that "...communication was very lively, and I guess we shared a general picture of the methodology for doing, not just linguistics, but behavioral science research. We were all more or less nativist, and all more or less mentalist. There was a lot of methodological conversation that one didn't need to have. One could get right to the substantive issues. So, from that point of view, it was extremely exciting."Harris 1993: 68 In 1962, Chomsky gave a paper at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists entitled "The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory", in which he outlined the transformational generative grammar approach to linguistics. In June 1964, he delivered a series of lectures at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (these were later published in 1966 as Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar).
All of these activities aided to develop what is now known as the "Standard Theory" of TGG, in which the basic formulations of Syntactic Structures underwent considerable revision. In 1965, eight years after the publication of Syntactic Structures, Chomsky published Aspects partly as an acknowledgment of this development and partly as a guide for future directions for the field.
Overview of topics As British linguist Peter Hugoe Matthews noted in his reviewMatthews 1967 of the book, the content of Aspects can be divided into two distinct parts: Chapter 1 is concerned with the psychological reality of language and the philosophy of language research, and the rest of the chapters deal with specific technical details within generative grammar.
The goal of linguistic theory Competence vs. performance: descriptive adequacy
In Aspects, Chomsky lays down the abstract, idealized context in which a linguistic theorist is supposed to perform his research: "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance." He makes a "fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situation)." A "grammar of a language" is "a description of the ideal speaker-hearer's intrinsic competence", and this "underlying competence" is a "system of generative processes." An "adequate grammar" should capture the basic regularities and the productive nature of a language. Chomsky calls this "descriptive adequacy" of the linguistic theory, in the sense that "it correctly describes its object, namely the linguistic intuition—the tacit competence—of the native speaker. In this sense, the grammar is justified on external grounds, on grounds of correspondence to linguistic fact."
Language acquisition, universal grammar and explanatory adequacy
Additionally, Chomsky sets forth another ambitious goal for linguistic theory in Aspects: that it has to be "sufficiently rich to account for acquisition of language, yet not so rich as to be inconsistent with the known diversity of language." In other words, linguistic theory must be able to describe how any normal human child masters the complexities of his mother tongue at such a young age, and how children all over the world master languages which are enormously different from one another in terms of vocabulary, word order and morpho-syntactic constructions.
In Chomsky's opinion, in order for a linguistic theory to be justified on "internal grounds" and to achieve "explanatory adequacy", it has to show how a child's brain, when exposed to primary linguistic data, uses special innate abilities or strategies (described as a set of principles called "Universal Grammar") and selects the correct grammar of the language over many other grammars compatible with the same data.
Grammaticality and acceptability
For Chomsky, "grammaticalness is ... a matter of degree." When sentences are directly generated by the system of grammatical rules, they are called "perfectly" or "strictly well-formed" grammatical sentences. When sentences are "derivatively generated" by "relaxing" some grammatical rules (such as "subcategorization rules" or "selectional rules"), they deviate from strictly well-formedness. Chomsky calls these grammatically "deviant". The degree and manner of their deviation can be evaluated by comparing their structural description with that of the strictly well-formed sentences. In this way, a theory of "degree of grammaticalness" can eventually be developed.
According to Chomsky, an "acceptable" sentence is one that is "perfectly natural" and "immediately comprehensible" and "in no way bizarre or outlandish". The notion of acceptability depends on various "dimensions" such as "rapidity, correctness, and uniformity of recall and recognition, normalcy of intonation". Chomsky adds that "acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence." So, there can be sentences that are grammatical but nevertheless unacceptable because of "memory limitations" or intonational and stylistic factors."
Emphasis on mentalism
In Aspects Chomsky writes that "linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior." With this mentalist interpretation of linguistic theory, Chomsky elevated linguistics to a field that is part of a broader theory of human mind, i.e. the cognitive sciences. According to Chomsky, a human child's mind is equipped with a "language acquisition device" formed by inborn mental properties called "linguistic universals" which eventually constructs a mental theory of the child's mother tongue.Chomsky 1965: 33 The linguist's main object of inquiry, as Chomsky sees it, is this underlying psychological reality of language. Instead of making catalogs and summaries of linguistic behavioral data demonstrated on the surface (i.e. behaviorism), a Chomsky-an linguist should be interested in using "introspective data" to ascertain the properties of a deeper mental system.
The mentalist approach to linguistics proposed by Chomsky is also different from an investigation of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying language. It is about abstractly determining the properties and functions of such mechanisms.Chomsky 1965: 193
The structure of grammar: deep structure