sphere of influence is one of the keys to Chomsky's thought.

Jakobson, was concerned with the

question of phonological universals: he believed that the different phonological structures found in the
languages of the world were merely superficial variations on a common underlying system (a belief
which conflicted both with the principled relativism of the Descriptivist school Although Jakobson
himself wrote mainly about phonological universals, he believed that the approach was applicable also
to other levels of linguistic structure;

The essence of Chomsky's approach to language is the claim that there are linguistic universals in the
domain of syntax; and Chomsky develops the hypothesis of syntactic universals into a theory of
considerably more richness and depth than Jakobson's theory of phonological universals.

For Saussure, it 'will be recalled, syntax was not even part of langue, the structure of a given language: putting words
together into sentences was something that individual speakers did on particular occasions, not something that a language
does once for all. Although later writers had not explicitly agreed with Saussure that syntax was a matter of parole,

Before he could show that the syntactic structures of different languages were similar, therefore, Chomsky had to show
how it was possible to define the syntax of any given language. Chomsky approached this question in , for example of a
won-well-defined class of linear figures would be the class of all beautiful figures. Some figures
(probably figures whose equations would be highly complex)

will be recognizably beautiful or at least attractive, others will be recognizably unattractive, and many (probably including
most of the simple figures such as straight lines and circles) will be neither one nor the other.
No doubt there will be an infinity of attractive figures, but is seems inconceivable that we could ever rigorously demarcate
the membership of that class

Rather, the problem is that humans are constantly discovering (or perhaps 'creating' or 'inventing' would be better
terms) categories of beauty that no one had previously recognized - we have to learn to see beauty, it is not a category
given to mankind in advance; so that the notion of a fixed distinction between beautiful and unbeautiful entities (whether
line drawings on a graph-paper or any other sort of thing) just does not apply. Any particular beautiful figure will be
definable by a (probably highly complex) equation, but the class of all beautiful figures cannot be defined.

so Chomsky proposed in his first book, Syntactic Structures (1957), that we should treat a language, from the syntactic
point of view, as a particular subset of the class of all possible sequences of the items in its dictionary.

similarly, the sequence The cat is on the mat belongs to English while the sequence *Mat the on is cat the falls
outside it. In Chomsky's terms, the former of these sequences is 'grammatical', or 'well-formed', the latter 'ungrammatical'
or 'ill-formed';

(Note that these terms are used in a purely descriptive rather than evaluative sense. / ain't never done nothing is
grammatical in a certain fairly widely spoken dialect of English, although not in the dialect in which this book is written;
the fact that the former dialect is deprecated by our society does not make it any less worthy of study from the scientist's
point of view. Since Chomsky is interested in discovering what kinds of language are 'natural' to humans, he might even
think the former dialect more worthy of study than standard written English, since it has been less regimented by the
artificial rules of purists.)

Chomsky takes it for granted that the class of all grammatical sentences in a language will be well-defined.
grammaticality depends on human mental activity rather than being physically. Chomsky's exposition of how in principle
the syntax of a language can be brought within the purview of scientific linguistic description is a great positive
contribution to the discipline.1

The next problem for Chomsky was to find some formal means of generating the class of grammatical morpheme-
sequences in a language, This use of the term 'generate', normal in mathematics, was borrowed by Chomsky into
linguistics, and his approach to syntax is accordingly known as 'generative grammar'.) At this point Chomsky looked to
the work of his first teacher, Zellig Harris who approached syntactic analysis by classifying morphemes into groups which
resembled one another in their distribution with respect to other morphemes.

Thus cat, dog, boy, tail and many other morphemes can each occur in the frame The _____ is on the mat; provided that we
do not find a lot of other frames which differentiate between these morphemes, we will regard them as members of a
single 'form-class'.

Having established that cat, dog, boy, tail, etc. belong to one class N, and that by parity of reasoning good, bad, gigantic,
and so on belong to a single class, say A, we then find that sequences such as good cat or gigantic dog occur in the same
frames that permit words such as cat and dog on their own the two-word phrases are equally appropriate as
replacements for the blank in The_______ is on the mat, for instance. We record this fact in an equation, 'A N = N\
This is an example of an 'endocentric' construction, (in which the whole has the same syntactic function )
2- We find also 'exocentric' constructions, which behave differently from any of their individual constituents. Thus, we
can symbolize the class including the, a, some, etc. (each of which can fill the blank in man is here) as /?; then we find
that R N (e.g. the cat, some bad boy) behaves neither like R nor like N, but like a further class, the class of proper names
some bad boy can fill the blank is here, and so can John or Mary, but neither the or some, nor again cat or bad boy,
can appear in that slot in isolation.) Thus we have R N = P.

Chomsky's next point is his most original. He observes that the algebraic notation system which he has borrowed from
Harris embodies a strong empirical claim about the syntactic properties of human languages. This is not Chomsky's
conclusion. Rather, Chomsky argues that the constituency theory of syntactic universals should be replaced with a
modified theory, which he sketches out in Syntactic Structures and which he and many of his followers have developed at
length since. The essence of the new theory of syntactic naturalness is that it expands the canonical notation system for
grammars by allowing the constituency rules to be supplemented with a series of so-called 'transformational rules'. A
transformational rule, briefly, is a rule which operates on the hierarchical structure , Thus hierarchical structure still has
the special role in Chomsky's new theory of syntax that it had in constituency grammar, however in the new theory a
sentence will have not just one but a series of hierarchical structures.