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as
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
(1975). Chomsky had taken one chapter from his research and submitted it as his thesis, ‘Transformational Analysis’. It foreshadows a key concept that would revolutionize linguistics, namely that various ‘deep structures’ of linguistic representation (typically at sentence level) get ‘transformed’, by way of various rules, into ‘surface structures’. A simplistic example would be the ‘transformation’ of an active sentence into a passive one. In English an active sentence like ‘the cat ate the rat’ contains many features of a deep structure that can be transformed into a less used (hence ‘marked’) passive sentence, ‘the rat was eaten by the cat’. The sentence ‘the cat ate the rat’ is of course also at the level of the ‘surface structure’, but only a few transformations had to be effected to arrive at it from the deep structure. Deep structures could also be abstracted, especially as phrasal constituents. Hence the traditional subject-verb-object description of an active sentence like ‘the cat ate the rat’ was rendered as a tree structure (where s = sentence, NP = Noun Phrase, VP = Verb Phrase, Det = determiner, N = noun, v = verb):

    Another key concept inherent in this model is the binary branching, which assumes more and more importance as the model undergoes its numerous improvements. This type of tree diagram analysis is nowadays widely accepted and practised, even at the level of introductory linguistics for language teachers. It can all get horribly complicated when complex sentences are involved and when complex transformations are thus represented. Multiple pages can be taken up by a single such diagram. An alternative formalism, also popularized by Chomsky early on, was to represent sentence strings in bracketed form, analogous to the language of symbolic logic. The above sentence would thus be written as:
    [s [Np[Det the][N cat]][vp[v ate][NP[Det the][N rat]]]]
    As can be imagined, such an analysis sparked a vast amount of data, often concentrating on a single sentence and its type. Linguists would debate conflicting analyses and propose ever more sophisticated solutions to highly intricate problems. At this stage, however, Chomsky was only at the very beginning of that process.
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory ( LSLT )
was microfilmed for the Harvard Libraries, and it soon became a sort of underground classic for the small circle of people in the know. Indeed much of Chomsky’s work was published long after it had first appeared in manuscript form and been freely distributed among those who had an interest in it. Access to as yet unpublished materials creates a circle of insiders who are well advanced compared to those who have to wait for publication. That circle of insiders around Chomsky at MIT and a few other select institutions became legend and at times aroused a certain animosity among outsiders.
    In 1955 the circle was very small indeed, and it still consisted mainly of a few graduate students. The one senior faculty member who became interested quite early was George Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, then a professor at Harvard. He was perhaps the only faculty member anywhere who actually read
LSLT
, and he and Chomsky began to work together, publishing technical papers in mathematical linguistics. In 1957 Miller was teaching a summer session at Stanford and invited Chomsky to join him, so Chomsky and his wife and first child shared an otherwise empty fraternity house that summer with George Miller, his wife and two children: a story seldom heard in the world of academia. As noted before, another who understood Chomsky’s linguistics was his fellow researcher Morris Halle, who already had a research position at the MIT electronics laboratory. Halle was at Harvard to do advanced studies under Roman Jakobson. This triangular relationship prompted Jakobson to arrange for Chomsky to be offered