ABSTRACT
When Syntactic Structures was published in 1957, the position it took on the nature of linguistic activity was sufficiently at odds with that of the prevailing orthodoxy that it was appropriate to refer to it as revolutionary. The first chapter declared that grammar was an autonomous system, independent of the study of the use of language in situations, and of semantics, and furthermore that it should be formalized as a system of rules that generates an infinite set of sentences.
