Syntactic formalisms

Abstract

Studies on syntax have been the core of linguistics for most of the twentieth century. While the goals of traditional grammars had been mostly to prescribe what the correct usage of a language is, the then-emerging syntactic theories aimed at an impartial description of language structures. These ideas revolutionized the field. Research activity was particularly intense in the years 1940–1970, and the focus on syntax was so great that, for a time, it nearly eclipsed phonetics, morphology, semantics, and other disciplines of linguistics.