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The Birth of Cognitive Science and the Publication of Syntactic Structures The importance of Chomsky's work became evident quite soon after he was hired by MIT. In September of 1956, the twenty-seven-year-old Chomsky delivered a paper entitled "Three Models for the Description of Language" as part of a three-day MIT symposium on information theory. According to Otero, the paper contained "the essential elements in [Chomsky's] innovative approach to language" ("Chomsky and the Cognitive Revolution" 14 ­ 15). Allen Newell and Herbert Simon presented work on problem solving with a "logic machine," and there were papers on signal detection and human information processing. This symposium ­ and these papers in particular ­ has been considered by some to mark the launch of the study of cognitive science. At the suggestion of Morris Halle, Chomsky then showed some of his lecture notes for the undergraduate course on language he was teaching to Cornelis Van Schoonefeld, the editor of a series entitled Janua Linguarum, which was put out by Mouton, a Dutch press. Schoonefeld offered to publish the notes. They appeared in 1957 in the form of a monograph called Syntactic Structures. Like Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew and The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, it radically opposes the entire Harris-Bloomfield tradition, though it does contain this frequently quoted remark: "During the entire period of this research I have had the benefit of very frequent and lengthy conversations with Zellig S. Harris. So many of his ideas and suggestions are incorporated into the text below and in the research on which it is based that I will make no attempt to indicate them by special reference" (6). It is apparent that Chomsky said this out of his great respect for Harris, but, as he explains, "on the understanding that every linguist who reads [the monograph] would understand, without my saying so explicitly, that I'm urging that the entire picture should be abandoned, from the ground up. I just didn't want to say that explicitly, for personal reasons. But it is explicit in the texts, and was obvious to professional linguists right away" (31 Mar. 1995). Chomsky's work during this period, described in Morphophonemics, Logical Structure, and Syntactic Structures, was a rejection of the prevailing mandate of procedural linguistics (to seek an array of operations that can be employed to reduce a corpus to an organized form suited to a given analyst's goals). He was looking, instead, for ways to "find the truth about language and linguistic theory" (31 Mar. 1995) ­ that is, he sought a universal grammar. It was clear to others in the field that Chomsky was posing a very serious challenge. Otero claims that among linguists "the reaction in the early years ranged from indifference to hostility," depending upon the domain. There was "great hostility with regard to the work on phonology (where the efforts were concentrated when he appeared on the scene), either hostility or total incomprehension with regard to the general picture (which was well beyond their purview), and indifference for the most part with regard to the work on syntax, a field which until then had not received too much attention . . ." ("Chomsky and the Challenges" 13 ­ 14). Just as Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was, for a long time, not accepted for distribution in North America because it contradicted the accepted view of the Spanish Civil War, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures diverged so radically from the standard opinion that it was not even mentioned in current reviews of American linguistics. Chomsky recalls a solitary exception, perhaps by Harold Allen, "which did mention Syntactic Structures, but as Dutch, probably thinking that I was Dutch. It's also the reason why nothing could be published here, for years" (31 Mar. 1995). The most important early review was by Robert Lees, who had asked to review the book before it was available, even in galleys. Lees was committed to the Harris model but nevertheless went to MIT in 1956 to work on the mechanical translation project. Encountering Chomsky there, he became convinced by his approach and went on to publish, in 1960, a book on transformational generative grammar entitled The Grammar of English Nominalizations, which was based on his dissertation. Lees's review was published in the influential journal Language in 1957; at that time, the journal was being edited by Bernard Bloch, who, "almost alone in the profession, was in favour of expression of a position that radically departed from the orthodoxy" (42). "Chomsky's book on syntactic structures," Lees wrote, "is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood in those fields." Lees anticipated the dramatic shift that this book would generate, noting that, it is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another speculative philosophy about the nature of Man and Language, but rather a rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicit measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar. (42) Although, as Chomsky has remarked, Lees "did what he thought was important," he was later thrown out of his research position for insubordination. Chomsky explains: What happened is that [Victor] Yngve's project was continually hiring very good linguists, but they all went the same way I did, at various rates. I'd made it clear even before I was appointed that I didn't think the project made any sense. Others (Lees, Matthews, Lukoff . . . ) had varying views about the matter, and did work on aspects of it. But gradually they all reached the same conclusion, and began to concentrate more and more on straight linguistics, then in a real ferment at MIT. Yngve wasn't happy about it: he was dedicated to machine translation. He's the one who fired Lees, in a pretty ugly way. (13 Feb. 1996) Lees was finally admitted, thanks to the intervention of Chomsky and Halle, into the electrical-engineering department, where he eventually got a Ph.D. in linguistics, although he was regarded in the field as a kind of Ò"traitor" (31 Mar. 1995). Another review of Syntactic Structures, this one by John Lyons (who went on to write a very early study of Chomsky, in 1970), concludes with the statement: "Chomsky's whole discussion of the relations between syntax and semantics will stimulate the interest of linguists in these problems and that is all to the good. His treatment of the external criteria of adequacy and the internal properties of grammars of the kind considered in this book makes a definite contribution to the theory of their construction" (87). In fact, Chomsky's own sense, then as now, was that the significance of Syntactic Structures was quite small, even "almost irrelevant." After all, the monograph was simply a collection of the notes that he had made for the undergraduate course he had been teaching. This course had been "geared to [the students'] interests"; Chomsky had, he maintains, been "trying to lead them from standard beliefs about Markov sources, information theory, automata, and the like, to an interest in language, which demonstrably could not fall within the range of the ideas then considered orthodox in `hard science' (which had little relation to structuralism, except that both approaches were irrelevant to the issues, in different ways)." What Chomsky considered to be the major contribution to linguistics was the last half of Syntactic Structuresê, which was taken directly from Logical Structureê, "the only serious contribution of mine to the (then nonexistent) field at that period (in syntax-semantics, that is; the work on contemporary generative phonology traces from Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew through the paper with Halle and [Fred] Lukoff and later work, including my unpublished 1959 paper at the Texas conference and Halle's 1959 dissertation, and on to The Sound Pattern of English, and beyond)" (31 Mar. 1995). But this, of course, was only the beginning.