Syntactic Structures (Chomsky)/ Book Review -- J. Colannino

Syntax relates to the ordering of words; grammar goes deeper, examining relationships among sentence parts and making a normative pronouncement; semantics deals with meaning: Chomsky showed that it was possible to divorce grammar from semantics to the benefit of linguistics.  He did this with a variety of examples, none more famous than "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The sentence is clearly syntactical and grammatical but lacks any real meaning (Chomsky, 15).  Contrastingly, I might add that a sentence such as "me wants on swing to play" (Hanegraaff, Apocalypse Code, 71) has meaning but is ungrammatical.  Nowadays, this seems obvious, but it was "Syntactic Structures" that made this distinction plain.  This seminal text was published during my birth year and I have always wanted to read it, but for a variety of reasons have not done so until now.
My research  is actually interested in the opposite problem -- constructing semantics from structure for the purpose of semantic searching. For example "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe (Carroll, Jaberwocky)" is of course meaningless, yet the grammar still provides semantic clues.  For example, it is clear that "brillig," "wabe," and "toves" are nouns, "gyre" and "gimble" are verbs, and "slithy" is an adjective, though they are words without meaning.   

I suppose the obvious question now is "So what?".  Well, divorcing grammar from semantics was actually a big deal -- one that lead to a great deal of progress in linguistics and grammar, and one that remains the dominant linguistic position of the day.  Chomsky showed that grammars could be vastly simplified if they were reduced to a tripartite construction comprising 1. a phrase structure -- e.g., noun phrase-verb phrase [the man] [hit the ball], 2. transformational rules -- e.g., a rule to turn a statement into a question [Did] [the man] [hit the ball], and 3. morphophonemic transformations -- e.g., things like rules for changing tense -- [the man] [will] [hit the ball].  This allowed for grammars to be simplified and divorced from thorny questions about meaning.  That is not to say that structure and meaning are divorced.  Language is primarily about meaning; grammar functions as an aid.  And as Pinker has shown (see my reviews) structure provides cues to meaning even at very elemental levels.  But the converse -- that grammar requires semantics -- is what Chomsky demonstrated to be false, and I suppose the fact that the same meaning can be shared in languages with very different grammars is one proof of this.

I am nonetheless reluctant to recommend this book: those who are linguists will have already read it and those who are not will be uninterested.  And, I think there are more modern works on grammar which are better suited for instruction.  Notwithstanding, it remains a remarkable work, and at only 118 pages something of a marvel besides.