句法理论面面观 (1965)

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (known in linguistic circles simply as Aspects) 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. 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. 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. 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".

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. 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. 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." 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 review 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.