Syntactic Structures

Frankly, I could not understand this book. But simply because I don't understand this, I don't want to give it a bad rating, so I've given it a high rating to be consistent with the other reviewers. This short book is a classic in linguistics, so I don't want to diminish it's importance.I learned of Noam Chomsky from reading Steven Pinkleur's, "The Language Instict". He describes Chomsky's work in a much more accessible way, describing a "toy grammar". I've been able to use Pinkleur's toy grammar to analyze German. I use the tree diagrams for sentences, with VP, NP, and PP phrases. It is a great tool for understanding the underlying meaning of sentences.But Chomsky's work, with all the "X's" and transitive equations is not user friendly... at least to someone on my level.

The book itself is great. The content’s just amazing. Everybody has to read it.The physical object I bought for 12 dollars it’s almost expensive for its quality.

Whether you love him, hate him or haven't the first clue what he's about, it's hard to deny that Noam Chomsky is *the* father of modern formal linguistics. This book is still considered a "gold standard" even after nearly 60 years. If you have any interest in studying or working on formal or computational linguistics, this realtively brief monograph is essential reading.

this is a must read for all students of linguistics. linguistic theory has progressed far beyond what Chomsky describes here, but this describes the origins of the theory and the issues that motivated the original analysis, that are still relevant today.

👍👍👍

This Chomsky guy is on to something!

ordered for my husband saved christmas thank you.

chomsky is brilliant. Love thinking my way through this book.

very specialised book, it assumes an existing, deep knowledge of the subject. it has proven too difficult for me to read

Excellent reading!

Noam Chomsky is clearly a very clever and knowledgeble man, but I am finding this book too technical and wordy. Perhaps it is not aimed at the undergratuate student?

Wow. Heavy Stuff!

im not sure. chomskys whole thing is that he applied mathematical rigor to language study. im honestly afraid to start this book. I tried to read an introduction to chomkys work and i found that unreadable. this is supposed to be written for a general audience. but then i bought chomskys on language. that is for a general audience, and it still quickly borders on the... esoteric. but i gota understand chomskys linguistics. its like an explanation for how the brain processes reality...