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Noam Chomsky – Syntactic Structures. Janua Linguarum, Nr. IV. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1957

Chomsky's first book, published only two years after he got his PhD. Hugely important in 20th-century linguistics, it contains the celebrated example of an utterance that is semantically meaningless while being syntactically correct - "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"(p. 15).

116 pp., original printed blue card wrappers, slightly sunned around spine and with a blotch (clear glue) on the front cover, internally fresh and unmarked, a very good copy of the rare first edition.

‘The conceptual framework of Chomsky’s early work on syntax has been extremely influential among philosophers, to some extent because his distinction between deep and surface structure seemed to sit well with the tradition within analytic philosophy (going back to Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions) that the surface appearance of a sentence often masks its true structure. … According to a 1992 tabulation of sources from the previous twelve years in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was the most frequently cited person alive, and one of the eight most frequently cited authors of all time’ (Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, Thoemmes Press, 2005).

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