Reddit mentions of Syntactic Structures

his early linguistic work was fundamentally with the goal of devising a universal mathematical model of natural language, particularly one that could support automatic machine translation, a project that was of particular interest to three letter agencies so they could translate Russian for basically free

The preface of Syntactic Structures that clearly states that "This work was supported in part by the U.S.A. Army... the Air Force... and the Navy": https://www.amazon.com/Syntactic-Structures-Noam-Chomsky/dp/1614278040

Similar footnote is in: http://twiki.di.uniroma1.it/pub/LC/WebHome/chomsky1959.pdf

you can call this "meaningful support" if you want to, at least in the past tense, but that's not really relevant in the context of the post lol. particularly, I posted with respect to aggasalk's marginal expression of surprise that "Chomsky actually seems to take this line." When given his early work, it's not surprising. Consider the position expressed:

>"US military-industrial complex works to a large degree as an R&D funnel for publicly-funded normal commercial/civilian development. computers and the internet, commercial airliners, all kinds of chemical industrial stuff, lots of other things"

"lots of other things" included his dissertation research and work toward getting tenure. after that, he did speak out against that military industrial complex, openly and continuously, but only after participating in that R&D funnel. so no, it's not surprising that Chomsky has a mild critique of the MIC itself, even when being veritably spicy with American imperialism