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From: sslyjim@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Jim Tyson)
Subject: Re: Introductions to Chomsky?
Sender: news@ucl.ac.uk (Usenet News System)
Message-ID: <1994Nov15.121706.27789@ucl.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 12:17:06 GMT
References: <3a0r95$s69@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Bloomsbury Computing Consortium
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In article <3a0r95$s69@agate.berkeley.edu> Patrick Hall <pathall@uclink.berkeley.edu> writes:
>Hi.
>As an undergraduate in Linguistics, I have read so many references to 
>Noam Chomsky that I feel like I have read everything he's ever written. Which, of course, is in no way true. Anyway, what I'm asking is for suggestions as to where, exactly, I should 
>start plowing. SPE? Syntactic Structures? Are there some good essays to 
>start with? 
>I'm just tired of reading about his work without reading the real thing... 

_Syntactic Structures_ is interesting historically but its relation to 
Chomsky's current thinking is (superficially at least) distant.  SPE is
his only major writing on phonology so worth reading if that is your interest.
Most of Chomsky's influential work has been in syntactic theory and a lot
of the important stuff is inaccessible to a beginner.  The best introduction
to current (well, except for a recent and still controversial paper...)
is _Knowledge of Language_, published by Praeger.  It is written with the
"lay" person in mind and is highly readable.  For philosophical/methodological
persepctives, you can't really do better than the two essays in _The Chyomskyan
Turn_ edited by Asher published by Blackwell.

Note that you will *not* get a working grasp of syntactic theory from any of
this stuff; you need a text book for that and Chomsky has not written one.
The shortest introductory text that is worth reading is Vivian Cook's
_Chomsky's Universal Grammar_ published by Blackwell and after that you
are in the realms of Radford and Haegemann.

Happy reading.

Jim


