Resumen de Prolegomeni a uno studio sulla ricezione del primo Chomsky in Unione Sovietica
Marco Biasio, Vittorio Springfield Tomelleri
Syntactic Structures, published by Noam Chomsky in 1957, marked a new, if not revolutionary, stage in the development of Western linguistics. Its impact behind the Iron Curtain has by far received much less attention. The text was very soon translated into Russian, in a period of lively discussions on structuralism after the liquidation of Marrism by Stalin in 1950 and the revision of Stalinism in 1956. The paper discusses the general scenario of those years, showing how concrete and strategic needs, such as machine translation and the introduction of mathematical methods in linguistics, paved the way to a formal approach and favored the quite positive and ideologically neutral acceptance of Syntactic Structures among Soviet scholars.
