01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Dr. Noam Chomsky On the strength of having submitted just one chapter of his thesis, Chomsky received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. Except for the relationships he maintained with Goodman and Harris, Chomsky's ties to that university had been severed in 1951, and other than presenting this chapter he fulfilled no formal obligation for the degree. The period during which he had written his thesis, which delineated the basics of much of his later work, had been an intense but solitary one for him. In virtual isolation, he labored with "incredible intensity." "In looking back, I don't see how it was possible. In just a few months I wrote my book of close to 1,000 pages, and it had in it just about everything that I've done since, at least in a rough form" (Language and Politics 129). This huge work was finally published (minus some of the technical material) in 1975 as The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Its origins have, for a long time, been a source of confusion, although the history of the manuscript has been set out in the book's introduction: "During the fall semester of 1955 I revised several chapters of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. At that time, two microfilms were made by Harvard Libraries, one of the 1955 version and one of the partially edited and revised January 1956 version. It is these two microfilms and the duplicated 1955 version that have been distributed over the years. I have not kept count, but there must be well over 1000 copies'' (Logical Structure 3). Chomsky did submit portions of the work to the Technology Press of MIT (which later became The MIT Press), but "it was rejected, with the not unreasonable observation that an unknown author taking a rather unconventional approach should submit articles based on this material to professional journals before planning to publish such a comprehensive and detailed manuscript as a book" (Logical Structure 3). The reason Chomsky had not tried to have sections of the work published in professional (that is, linguistic) journals "is that what I was actually doing had virtually no detectable relation to linguistics ­ at least, structural linguistics as practiced in the U.S. and Europe. That includes all of Harris's work" (31 Mar. 1995). The manuscript that was eventually published in 1975 contained portions of both the 1955 version and the 1956 version. In 1958, Chomsky was made a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, during which time he revised six chapters of Logical Structure. The strange history of this text is recounted by Frank Heny in his 1979 review of the book for the journal Synthèse. Heny points out that the book was written twenty years before its publication, and that it laid the foundations for an entirely new field of research: what has come to be known as transformational grammar. The manuscript of Logical Structure circulated within a small group of academics, and therefore remained "little more than a vague rumor. Yet the arguments for Chomsky's particular brand of transformational analysis, even in that confusing, degenerate and often grossly distorted form in which they were passed from hand to hand somehow won the day. The grammatical transformation very soon achieved undisputed dominance ­ at least in American linguistics" (308). So, by the mid-1950s, Noam Chomsky, a newly minted scholar, stood at the forefront of a nonexistent field. He was also unemployed.