Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, published in 1965 by the American linguist Noam Chomsky, is known in linguistic circles simply as «Aspects». It is considered the foundational document of the Chomskyan theoretical framework and the first broad, systematic statement of his transformational generative grammar, a kind of syntactic theory he had introduced in the 1950s with his first book, Syntactic Structures.

The book emerged from a profound change in linguistic research after 1957, especially at MIT, where generative grammar was well received. There Morris Halle, Robert Lees, Edward Klima and others collaborated, and in 1961 Chomsky and Halle founded the graduate program in linguistics, which attracted young researchers such as Jerry Fodor, Jerrold Katz and Paul Postal. Between 1962 and 1964 Chomsky presented and developed his ideas at congresses and lecture series, which formed the basis of what came to be called the «Standard Theory». Aspects reflected that evolution and, at the same time, set out directions for future research.

The book has two clearly distinct parts. The first chapter deals with the psychological reality of language and the philosophy of linguistic research; the remaining chapters address technical details of generative grammar. Its central claim is that linguistic theory should be understood as the study of the human mind. Chomsky distinguishes competence, the tacit knowledge an ideal speaker-hearer has of their language, from performance, the concrete use of language, which is affected by memory, distraction or error. For him, a grammar is a description of that intrinsic competence, expressed as a system of generative processes.

From this starting point the book proposes three levels of evaluation for a theory: descriptive adequacy, which correctly describes the linguistic intuition of the native speaker; explanatory adequacy, which shows how a child acquires a language from limited data through innate principles he calls universal grammar; and degrees of grammaticalness, which separate strictly well-formed sentences from deviant ones, and keep this notion distinct from acceptability, which belongs to the study of performance.

The work consolidated a rationalist, nativist and mentalist turn against the behaviorism, structuralism and empiricism that dominated linguistics, and placed the discipline within the cognitive sciences. Its influence was very wide, though it also provoked debate about the role of innateness and the nature of the mind.