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judged in the same way all scientific theories are: it should explain as much as it can with as little as possible. It should be simple and elegant. Viewed this way, possible grammars of a language can be compared in the same way that different theories in science are: the successful one more fully explains the phenomena in question in as economical terms as possible.
    Syntactic Structures, for example, contrasted two methods for writing a grammar. The best method, said Chomsky, collapsed all of language into a set of rules. And in much the same way that software generates output in a computer, those rules can generate an entire language. For example, an English sentence can be described as “S goes to NP VP,” meaning that a sentence (S) consists of a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). “NP goes to Det N” means that a noun phrase consists of an “a,” the determiner (Det), and a noun (N). 7
    Chomsky also pointed out that the set of language rules could be made smaller and simpler if you included ways to relate certain sentences to each other. “The man read the book” and “The book was read by the man,” for example, have a striking similarity. Instead of having separate rules for each of them, Chomsky suggested that the more complicated second sentence was derived from the first. He called this a transformation. 8
    If the phrase structure analysis of “The man read the book” is “S goes to NP 1 VP NP 2 ,” then “The book was read by the man” can be represented as “S goes to NP 2 VP by NP 1 .” In this way, the relationship between all the simple active sentences of English and their passive versions can be described by just these two simple structures and the transformational rule that links them.
    Language, in this view, is basically a set of sentences. And the job of a grammar, or theory of language, is to generate all of the language’s allowable sentences (“The cat sat on the mat”; “The plane was rocked by turbulence”) but none of the bad ones (“Cat mat the on sat”; “Turbulence plane by the rocked was”). A grammar generates all possible utterances of a language, Chomsky said, “in the same way that chemical theory generates all possible compounds.” 9
     
     
     
    Syntactic Structures got Chomsky some attention, but at the time of publication it wasn’t especially well known. Two years later Chomsky made a much larger splash when he published a review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior . The review appeared in what was at the time the premier journal of linguistics, Language . Skinner, a psychologist, was already well known for his theory of behaviorism. In its simplest form, behaviorism says that all animals, humans included, are like machines—if you press their buttons in the right way, they’ll respond automatically. The appearance of emotion or thought is irrelevant, because everything can be reduced to behavior. As long as you know what kind of machine you are dealing with—human, feline, avian—you can control its behavior. Even very complicated behavior can be reduced to a series of depressed buttons.
    At the time, people spoke about Skinner in the terms they would later use to describe Chomsky. In her book Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin wrote about the behaviorist’s influence when she was a college student. “Dr. Skinner was so famous,” she remembered, “just about every college kid in the country had a copy of Beyond Freedom and Dignity on his bookshelf.” Of behaviorism she added, “It’s probably hard for people to imagine [the power] this idea had back then. It was almost a religion. To me—to lots of people—B. F. Skinner was a god. He was a god of psychology.” 10
    Chomsky’s review was published two years after Skinner’s book came out, oddly late in the day for a book review, even in academia. Nevertheless, it had an immediate impact. Skinner suggested that language was a simple behavior, a notion Chomsky dismissed as absurd.