Noam Chomsky

A signed first edition of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky.

• Noam Chomsky (American).
• S-Gravenhage [The Hague]: Mouton & Co, 1957.
• 116 pages.
• Signed by Chomsky to title page.
• Original grey-blue wrappers, in custom black clamshell box with black goatskin spine.

Signed first edition of Chomsky's first book, a landmark of linguistics and cognitive science, containing the first appearance of his famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Chomsky's Syntactic Structures is no less than a "Copernican revolution" (Voegelin, 229) in the field of linguistics and cognitive science. In it, he puts forth his theory of transformational generative grammar, disproving B. F. Skinner's "beads on a string" theory of sentence construction, and in the process giving us one of the most iconic sentences in the English language: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The work of Zellig Harris, Chomsky's teacher and mentor, formed the foundation of many of the points Chomsky makes in Syntactic Structures, which he has further clarified and refined over the course of his long career. This copy, signed by Chomsky, represents in physical form a seismic shift in our understanding of language.