Arise, librarians: Today the world is yours

In the mid 1950s the field of linguistics suddenly shot into the academic limelight. In the 19 and early 20 centuries it was a dusty corner of the humanities, entered by would-be scholars through a rite of passage that involved journeying to a far-flung corner of the known universe, locating an obscure and heretofore unknown language, conquering it, and returning with a detailed record of its characteristics. Though they respected these endeavours, no one in other disciplines cared much about them from an intellectual point of view. But in 1957 everything changed with the publication of a book entitled Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky, a young man still in his twenties. He postulated a universal basis for language (called deep structure) and a series of generative rules (called transformations) that act on the deep structure to produce the complex sentences that we use for everyday communication. All languages have the same deep structure, which is innate in human beings. Languages differ from one another in surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformation, pronunciation, and word insertion. This revolutionary and completely unexpected hypothesis promised to unlock the secrets of the mind. It catapulted linguistics from a sort of academic marginalia into the very centre of the study of the brain, cognition, and the mind-body problem. It was as if the sun had suddenly and unexpectedly risen over the field.