Preliminary draft copy of Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory by Noam Chomsky

Reference:GB 237 Coll-1614
Dates of Creation:1955-1975
Name of Creator:
Language of Material:English
Physical Description:

Scope and Content
Professor Angus McIntosh passed this copy of the 4-volume preliminary draft of Noam Chomsky PhD thesis (University of Pennsylvania, 1955), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory to Professor James Thorne (d. 1988).
Volume I is inscribed on the first page, manuscript: For Jimmy / - to whom it is much more directly useful - / this treasured and distinguished / piece of pathfinding / from / Angus / with warmest regards / December 3rd 1986. On the title-page it is inscribed, manuscript: Angus McIntosh / - received from Noam Chomsky / soon after it was written. The volume contains the Introduction to Chapter V p.189.
Volume II contains Chapter VI to Chapter VIII p. 401.
Volume III contains Chapter VIII p.402 to Chapter IX p. 601
Volume IV contains Chater IX p.602 to Chapter X p.752 (end)
Administrative / Biographical History
This preliminary draft of the 1955 PhD thesis (University of Pennsylvania) entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory by Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) - and published 1975 - had been in the possession of Professor Angus McIntosh (1914-2005).
Angus McIntosh was born near Sunderland on 10 January 1914. He was educated at Ryhope Grammar School and he studied at Oriel College, Oxford. There he took first-class honours in English in 1934. As a Harmsworth scholar, he went on to a Diploma in Comparative Philology at Merton College. After a period at Harvard as a Commonwealth fellow (1936-38), he took up a lectureship in the English department at University College Swansea.
After a short spell in the Tank Corps during the Second World War, McIntosh served as a Major in military intelligence, at Bletchley. Experience there influenced his thinking about the potential of computers as a tool for linguistic analysis.
After the war, he returned to a lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, before going on to Edinburgh University. Here, he became the prime mover in the founding of the School of Epistemics (now Informatics) and the School of Scottish Studies, out of the separate Departments of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. He was also behind two major dictionary projects and the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Indeed, while assessing returns from the survey questionnaire that McIntosh began to see the possibility of applying the methodology of modern dialect surveys to the investigation of past stages of the language. His experiements, and those of his collaborators, would revolutionise dialect research in historical linguistics.
His pioneering work for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland resulted in the publication of the Introduction to a Survey of Scottish Dialects (1952). Also that year, he set up the Joint Council for the Scottish Dictionaries. McIntosh was a supporter of both the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (Dost), and he managed to get long-term funding not only for Dost but also for Lalme - A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediæval English - and the Institute of Historical Dialectology.
He was a Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and he was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1989, he received the British Academy's Sir Israel Gollancz prize. He held honorary doctorates from Poznan, Durham, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Professor Angus McIntosh died 26 October 26 2005.
About Noam Chomsky... much has been written elsewhere.
Access Information
Open to bona fide researchers, but please contact repository for details in advance of visit.
Acquisition Information
Accession no: E2015.18.
Archivist's Note
Catalogued by Graeme D. Eddie 23 April 2015