2015 Reprint of 1957 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. American linguist Paul Postal wrote in 1964 that most of the "syntactic conceptions prevalent in the United States" were "versions of the theory of phrase structure grammars in the sense of Chomsky". British linguist John Lyons wrote in 1966 that "no work has had a greater influence upon the current linguistic theory than Chomsky's Syntactic Structures." Prominent historian of linguistics R. H. Robins wrote in 1967 that the publication of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" was "probably the most radical and important change in direction in descriptive linguistics and in linguistic theory that has taken place in recent years". Another historian of linguistics Frederick Newmeyer considers "Syntactic Structures" "revolutionary" for two reasons. Firstly, it showed that a formal yet non-empiricist theory of language was possible and more importantly, it demonstrated this possibility in a practical sense by formally treating a fragment of English grammar. Secondly, it put syntax at the center of the theory of language. Syntax was recognized as the focal point of language production, in which a finite set of rules can produce an infinite number of sentences. As a result, morphology and phonology were relegated in importance. "Syntactic Structures" also initiated an interdisciplinary dialog between philosophers of language and linguists. American philosopher John Searle wrote that "Chomsky's work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era, comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has done more than simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a new discipline of generative grammar and is having a revolutionary effect on two other subjects, philosophy and psychology". With its formal and logical treatment of language, Syntactic Structures also brought linguistics and the new field of computer science closer together.

On submitting this book to the readers I wish to thank all those who have helped me to bring it to its present form. First of all, I wish to thank Professor Tadeusz Kotarbinski, who had been kind enough to read the manuscript. His profound and penetrating criticism helped me to add precision to many passages of this book. I also thank the translator Dr Olgierd Wojtasiewicz and Mr George Bidwell who checked the translation. Quotations from non-E nglish-language books are either given in existing English version, if available, or translated into English. In three cases only they are given in the original version. This refers to quotations from Husserl, Jaspers, and Vossler, and is due to the specific character of these texts. A. S. [vi. (Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.) About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology. Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text. Read books online for free at

The main purpose of this book is to bring together much of the research conducted in recent years in a subject I find both fascinating and impor tant, namely fairness. Much of the reported research is still in the form of technical reports, theses and conference papers, and only a small part has already appeared in the formal scientific journal literature. Fairness is one of those concepts that can intuitively be explained very brieft.y, but bear a lot of consequences, both in theory and the practicality of programming languages. Scientists have traditionally been attracted to studying such concepts. However, a rigorous study of the concept needs a lot of detailed development, evoking much machinery of both mathemat ics and computer science. I am fully aware of the fact that this field of research still lacks matu rity, as does the whole subject of theoretical studies of concurrency and nondeterminism. One symptom of this lack of maturity is the proliferation of models used by the research community to discuss these issues, a variety lacking the invariance property present, for example, in universal formalisms for sequential computing.

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of `be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb `be'.