CHOMSKY, Noam.
Syntactic Structures.
The Hague: Mouton & Company , 1957.
$15,000.00
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Item Number: RRB-151834
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"Syntax is the study of the principle and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages": First Edition of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures; Lengthily Signed by Him
First edition of one of the most consequential works in the history of modern linguistics and one of the landmark intellectual publications of the twentieth century. Octavo, original wrappers. Lengthily signed by the author on the half-title page with the added words, "Syntax is the study of the principle and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages Noam Chomsky." A quotation drawn from the text itself, transforming the inscription into a statement of the book's central purpose and lending the copy an unusually substantive and personal character. From the collection of linguist Paul Hans Christopherson with his ownership inscription to the front panel. Paul Hans Christophersen (1911–1989) was a Danish-born linguist and philologist whose career carried him across an unusually wide range of institutions — from Cambridge, where he obtained his doctorate in 1943 while serving as a BBC speaker and translator during the Second World War, to professorships at the universities of Copenhagen, Ibadan, Oslo, Ulster, and Qatar — and who was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 1956. The centerpiece of his scholarly output is his 1939 dissertation The Articles: A Study of Their Theory and Use in English, produced in part through his collaboration on Otto Jespersen's monumental Modern English Grammar, which brought exceptional analytical rigor to one of the most deceptively difficult areas of English grammar. His later work Second-Language Learning (1973) demonstrated a penetrating understanding of the cognitive challenges facing foreign language learners that anticipated many of the central preoccupations of modern applied linguistics, while The Ballad of Sir Aldingar (1952) made a significant contribution to folklore studies by identifying a British ballad tradition as a partial source for a range of related Scandinavian narrative motifs — a breadth of scholarly range that defined a career of quiet but considerable distinction. In near fine condition. First editions of Syntactic Structures in original wrappers are scarce, especially with such a lengthy inscription.
Published as the fifty-fourth volume in the Janua Linguarum series, Syntactic Structures was Chomsky's first book and the work that inaugurated the generative grammar revolution — a paradigm shift in the study of language so fundamental that it reshaped not only linguistics but cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and psychology simultaneously. Drawing on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania and refining the theoretical framework he had been developing under Zellig Harris, Chomsky argued that human language cannot be adequately described by the finite-state and phrase-structure grammars that structural linguistics had employed, and that a transformational generative grammar — one capable of producing an infinite number of grammatical sentences from a finite set of rules — was required to account for the creative and recursive properties of natural human language. The book's most celebrated contribution, the Colorless green ideas sleep furiously argument, demonstrated with elegant simplicity that grammatical well-formedness and semantic meaningfulness are entirely independent properties of language — a distinction whose implications for both linguistics and the philosophy of mind proved inexhaustible. Eric Lenneberg called the book's impact on linguistics comparable only to that of Mendel on biology, and the cognitive revolution it helped inaugurate permanently displaced the behaviorist model of language acquisition that had dominated American psychology, most notably in Chomsky's devastating 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.
Syntactic Structures.
$15,000.00
In Stock
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