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Aspectos da Teoria da Sintaxe
Trata-se de uma tradução portuguesa desta obra muito importante de Chomsky, acompanhada de uma extensa tradução e notas explicativas.
372 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
Noam Chomsky
997 books17.5k followersAvram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 24, 2018
The whole book is great, but the five-star rating is for the first chapter since it's the reason I wanted to read the book. Chapter One is basically a must-read for current and prospective theoreticians. It introduces the differences between grammaticality and acceptability, the notions of competence and performance, the three levels of adequacy (observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy, and explanatory adequacy), and other concepts. I enjoyed reading this chapter specifically.
October 1, 2009
Very necessary
October 23, 2022
me he metido el libro en tres días y no debería haber hecho eso, tengo la cabeza como un bombo
January 9, 2024
Chomsky's Aspects is usually divided by readers into two parts--the philosophical part and the nuts-and-bolts part. I will treat the two parts here separately.
The Methodological Preliminaries section is considered a classic in the field of linguistics. Here is an early (1965) formulation of the poverty of the stimulus argument. How can a perfect system emerge from the messy chaos of actual speech that the young'n is exposed to? Chomsky uses this as the basis of his argument that syntax is innate. The child already knows grammar and so can abstract the system from the noise rather easily. And so any truly scientific treatment of syntax would need to account not just for how a language is acquired but also how universal (underlying, deep, subconscious, innate) grammar is manifested in each and every language. Although elegantly stated, Chomsky's position is wrong on at least two fronts. First, language is throughout a messy business, and any attempt to find an aesthetically pleasing, balanced, and elegant system in the language of adults OR of children will run aground on the data. The idea of a well formed competence was invented by some very non-reflexive university professors who were blind to their own prescriptive biases. Period. Talk to the woman or man on the street and you will see something very different from underlyingly elegant and beautiful talk. The uneducated have their own systems of grammar and rhetoric which look nothing like a system of competence (but these systems do display a competence sui generis). Second, there is no essence to syntax that reveals itself in all human languages. I seriously doubt that any substantive universal has been discovered. There are enough languages out there that any property of universal grammar will be overturned by a counterexample. This has nothing to do with race, but it has everything to do with history. Humboldt (whom Chomsky fails to understand) long ago made it clear that the creativity of language will in time sediment into a bedrock of constraining tradition. I personally believe that this variance at the hands of history will make languages eventually appear as unique as snowflakes or clouds.
After that nebulous thought, I turn to the better part of the book, the part that discusses how English syntax works. Although this array of machinery was almost entirely jettisoned with the advent of X-Bar, Theta Theory, or government and binding, the questions and problems he faced in 1965 did not go away. We still cannot, at least for English, dispense with notions such as phrase structure, semantic selection, syntactic subcategorization, etc. Today, the nuts and bolts of his theory turn out to be less rusty that his methodological preliminaries.
If someone asked me to recommend a readable work by Chomsky that addressed empirical issues with a formalist method, I would recommend either Aspects of THE Theory of Syntax or possibly Remarks on Nominalization. But first I would try to talk her out of reading Chomsky at all. Aspects is not a good starting point for an exploration of linguistics. It is more like a place where thinking goes to die.
The Methodological Preliminaries section is considered a classic in the field of linguistics. Here is an early (1965) formulation of the poverty of the stimulus argument. How can a perfect system emerge from the messy chaos of actual speech that the young'n is exposed to? Chomsky uses this as the basis of his argument that syntax is innate. The child already knows grammar and so can abstract the system from the noise rather easily. And so any truly scientific treatment of syntax would need to account not just for how a language is acquired but also how universal (underlying, deep, subconscious, innate) grammar is manifested in each and every language. Although elegantly stated, Chomsky's position is wrong on at least two fronts. First, language is throughout a messy business, and any attempt to find an aesthetically pleasing, balanced, and elegant system in the language of adults OR of children will run aground on the data. The idea of a well formed competence was invented by some very non-reflexive university professors who were blind to their own prescriptive biases. Period. Talk to the woman or man on the street and you will see something very different from underlyingly elegant and beautiful talk. The uneducated have their own systems of grammar and rhetoric which look nothing like a system of competence (but these systems do display a competence sui generis). Second, there is no essence to syntax that reveals itself in all human languages. I seriously doubt that any substantive universal has been discovered. There are enough languages out there that any property of universal grammar will be overturned by a counterexample. This has nothing to do with race, but it has everything to do with history. Humboldt (whom Chomsky fails to understand) long ago made it clear that the creativity of language will in time sediment into a bedrock of constraining tradition. I personally believe that this variance at the hands of history will make languages eventually appear as unique as snowflakes or clouds.
After that nebulous thought, I turn to the better part of the book, the part that discusses how English syntax works. Although this array of machinery was almost entirely jettisoned with the advent of X-Bar, Theta Theory, or government and binding, the questions and problems he faced in 1965 did not go away. We still cannot, at least for English, dispense with notions such as phrase structure, semantic selection, syntactic subcategorization, etc. Today, the nuts and bolts of his theory turn out to be less rusty that his methodological preliminaries.
If someone asked me to recommend a readable work by Chomsky that addressed empirical issues with a formalist method, I would recommend either Aspects of THE Theory of Syntax or possibly Remarks on Nominalization. But first I would try to talk her out of reading Chomsky at all. Aspects is not a good starting point for an exploration of linguistics. It is more like a place where thinking goes to die.
January 20, 2008
Awe-inspiring, but still an essentially cauldrony-esoteric approach to a perfectly human behavior. Where's the beef?
Read
August 9, 2022Abandoned, DNF. This simply wasn't what I was hoping it would be. Chomsky's nomenclature is used in computer science to describe programming languages and syntax. I was hoping to get an insight into the origin of terms like "regular grammar" and "type 2 grammar".
That info may have been in here, but I couldn't make it past the first couple chapters. I tried. This kind of academic writing seems to be trying so hard to make sure no statement could possibly be incorrect...and whatever point is being made gets completely buried in the lawyerly language. No thanks. I'll stick with pop science writing for anything outside my immediate area of interest. :-)
That info may have been in here, but I couldn't make it past the first couple chapters. I tried. This kind of academic writing seems to be trying so hard to make sure no statement could possibly be incorrect...and whatever point is being made gets completely buried in the lawyerly language. No thanks. I'll stick with pop science writing for anything outside my immediate area of interest. :-)
November 25, 2025
Hier lernen wir, dass Sinn und Struktur zwei völlig verschiedene Paar Schuhe sind. Chomsky führt uns vor Augen, dass der berühmte Satz „Farblose grüne Ideen schlafen wütend“ zwar inhaltlicher Unfug, aber grammatikalisch ein Meisterstück ist – eine Erkenntnis, die jeden Poeten verzweifeln, aber jeden Logiker jubeln lässt. Wer „Sprache und Geist“ und „Aspekte der Syntax-Theorie“
liest, begreift Sprache nicht mehr als Kunst, sondern als ein mathematisches System, in dem es vollkommen gleichgültig ist, was man sagt, solange man es nach den strengen Regeln der generativen Grammatik sagt.
liest, begreift Sprache nicht mehr als Kunst, sondern als ein mathematisches System, in dem es vollkommen gleichgültig ist, was man sagt, solange man es nach den strengen Regeln der generativen Grammatik sagt.
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December 17, 2019dnf
Read
April 12, 2023pretty dry. knows what he's on about, nevertheless.
April 18, 2024
{book 12/50 2024 reading challenge}
Great for researchers.
Great for researchers.
December 6, 2022
"When Chomsky speaks, god listens"
October 12, 2016
I find Chomsky to be extremely dry but his work is the cornerstone of modern syntactic theory. Even if you dislike his writing, you must admire the elegance of his work in context.
July 7, 2008
Nice work by Chomsky, it's one of his early (but apparently over-rated) works. Dense, interesting and really creative. Of all things stated in this book, I just can't buy his arguments for the innateness of language in the first part of this book, although one can easily dismiss those ideas and proceed to the other chapters without any considerable problem (I, personally, had no problem in doing that).
December 15, 2015
Damn this is a chewy book. I had to read each chapter at least twice to even get the gist of the argument, and I'll probably have to go through the book a few more times over the next year or so.
Still, I already have a much better understanding of Chomsky's formulation, and I can see how valuable this is going to be for understanding how we've arrived at our contemporary discussion of syntax.
Still, I already have a much better understanding of Chomsky's formulation, and I can see how valuable this is going to be for understanding how we've arrived at our contemporary discussion of syntax.
March 24, 2008
I don't give this one star only because this book spurred a great deal of research in Linguistics.
March 15, 2015
This created a lot of responsive research, mostly because people kept citing this despite huge flaws. It would be easier to evaluate this work if he could write more clearly.
June 24, 2015
Easily one of the most formative, mind-expanding and influential books I ever read as a young uni student; I thoroughly recommend you do too. m
January 29, 2025
The first chapter of the book is an important philosophical work.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews