Assessing Chomsky

Abstract

The number of possible sentences of a language is thought to be infinite. Reading this enormous collection of articles, one begins to wonder if the same is true of the number of useful sentences that can be written about Chomsky. The editor unfortunately does not indicate why these 168 papers were chosen, a criticism to which I shall return below, and there is no map to help navigate this large territory beyond the table of contents. The latter takes up twelve pages, too many to reproduce here. I shall therefore begin by sketching the overall structure of the collection, before examining each volume in turn. I shall mark out in particular the contributions which are either completely new (eleven in total) or were previously inaccessible, unpublished, or not available in English before they appeared here. 1. STRUCTURE The collection consists of four 'volumes', as follows: