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Sentences can be grammatical but meaningless. (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”) Different sentences can have the same underlying structure. The passive of “John loves Mary” has the same underlying structure as “John is loved by Mary.” In his simplified, essential “kernel,” Chomsky suggests an approach to a grammar where “the passives are deleted and reintroduced by a transformation that interchanges the subject and object of the active.” So, in “the simplest grammar … we find that the kernel consists of simple, declarative, active sentences … and all other sentences can be described more simply as transforms.”

Then there are ambiguous sentences that may have the same words but more than one underlying structure. “The shooting of the hunters” might be a transformation of “the hunters shoot” or “they shoot the hunters.” Grammaticalness occurs when transformations generate syntactic equivalence. Passive is equivalent to active. Ambiguous sentences have two underlying grammatical equivalences. And the measure of grammaticalness in each case? The “intuitive knowledge” that underlies what would be “acceptable to a native speaker.”¹⁰⁰

At first, Chomsky called his grammar “transformational-generative,” meaning that there is a relatively small number of underlying grammatical rules from which all sentences in all languages are generated. And the constituent components of these sentences are an even smaller number of stable, abstract components in the form of noun phrases (for instance the/a + noun), verb phrases (for instance, auxiliary + verb), and the like. “We can represent this grammar as a machine,” he says, “with a finite number of internal states.” Grammar is an “abstract system … of representation related only by general rules.”¹⁰¹

But by the mid-sixties, Chomsky had changed the focus of his grammar from a grammatical “kernel” to something even more basic, which he now called “deep structure,” or more plainly, “the rules that specify well-formed strings of minimally functioning units” of syntax. He also became interested in nesting structures, or recursion: “[[[the man who you met] from Boston] who was on the train].”¹⁰²

“Deep structure” is the grammatical logic underlying language, any language, every language. Surface structure is the manifestation of grammatical logic in a particular language. But how does one work back from the hearable forms of speech to these deep structures? (Chomsky’s language analysis always starts with phonemics, or speech, ignoring writing as if it were secondarily irrelevant, a mere rendering of speech.) His practice of linguistics came to demand such technical dexterity that his transformational grammar became impenetrable to all but specialists.

Whence the standard for judging the underlying grammaticalness of speech? “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows the language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying language in actual performance.”¹⁰³ In other words, the standard is one that never, in a more fallible human reality, exists.

And what is the source of the examples Chomsky uses to illustrate his theory to demonstrate what is grammatical and what is not? Where do “colorless green ideas” and other such apparently meaningless but perfectly grammatical sentences come from? “How do I know?” Chomsky responds, as if his interviewer were asking a silly question. “Because I am a native speaker of the English language.”¹⁰⁴ Chomsky is the source, the standard. For the purposes of theory formulation, he suspends all the constraints of speech in practice. Instead he analyzes an idealized version of his own speech. He makes it all up.

The ultimate object of Chomsky’s analysis, somewhat like Husserl’s “bracketing,”^§MS0.4c is the working of the human mind, reducible to its essentials. “Linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering mental reality underlying actual behavior.” Chomsky’s grammar idealizes the perfectly grammatical structures. These are what he extrapolates to be the essence of mental reality, even though actual behavior may be erratic.

Chomsky’s is “a theory of linguistic intuition,”¹⁰⁵ be that sourced in the intuitions of the speaker that drive their syntax, or the intuitions of the linguist who disentangles their underlying logic of meaning – logics which may not have been evident even to the speaker, and of which the speaker may not be conscious.

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⁹⁸ Randy Allen Harris, 1993, The Linguistics Wars, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, p. 38; Robert F. Barsky, 2011, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 41–43.

⁹⁹ Noam Chomsky, 1957, Syntactic Structures, Amsterdam, NL: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 111–14.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., pp. 13, 15, 77, 80, 89, 13.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., pp. 37, 59.

¹⁰² Noam Chomsky, 1964, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 3, 13.

¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 4.

¹⁰⁴ Quoted in Randy Allen Harris, 1993, The Linguistics Wars, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, p. 97.

¹⁰⁵ Noam Chomsky, 1964, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 4, 19.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 290–294. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Noam Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” §MS3.1.2f