LSLT 1975 1st Noam Chomsky Logical Structure Linguistic Theory HC/DJ Plenum 📘

by Noam Chomsky

$150 · Offered by eBay

First edition

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. That sentence first turned up in this book — not in the slimmer 1957 Syntactic Structures that made it famous. 🧠 This is the cathedral, not the pamphlet. The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory is the 1955 Harvard/Penn manuscript Chomsky spent twenty years trying to get into print. MIT’s Technology Press declined it. Specialists passed it around on microfilm. Then Plenum Press finally issued it in 1975: red cloth, gilt spine, diagrams and rewrite-rule formulas running through vi + 573 pages, 9.25" × 6.5", ISBN 030630760X. No edition or printing statement on the copyright page — apparent first edition, the first time the full argument left the seminar room and entered a bound book. What you are buying is the operating system under modern linguistics. Phrase structure. Transformations. Levels of adequacy. The claim that a grammar is a finite device that generates an infinite set of sentences. The seed of what later became universal grammar and the cognitive-science turn. Syntactic Structures (1957) was the lecture-note sketch. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) was the next architecture. LSLT is the source code. The author. Avram Noam Chomsky (b. 1928, Philadelphia), son of the Hebrew scholar William Chomsky, junior fellow at Harvard, Ph.D. Pennsylvania 1955 on Transformational Analysis (a slice of this manuscript), then MIT. Often called the father of modern linguistics; co-founder of cognitive science; later the public face of Ma

• Publisher: Plenum Press
• Year: 1975
• Binding: Hardcover
• ISBN: 030630760x
• Condition: Good

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.