from semantics to syntax. Despite the paradigm shift, American linguists maintained Wundt's syntactic analysis which entails the placement of the grammatical object into the verb phrase. They believed that languages should be analysed based on how native speakers feel is right. How to translate this idea into a scientific statement remained a vexing issue in American linguistics for decades. Harris and Rulon Wells justified analysing the object as part of the verb phrase per 'economy'; but this term, again, merely suggested the perceived 'easiness' of the practice. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky changes the meaning of Hjelmslev's principle of arbitrariness which meant that the generative calculus is merely a tool for the linguist and not a structure in reality. David Lightfoot however points out in his introduction to the second edition that there were few points of true interest in Syntactic Structures itself, and the eventual interpretations that the rules or structures are 'cognitive', innate, or biological would have been made elsewhere, especially in the context of a debate between Chomsky and the advocates of behaviourism. But decades later Chomsky makes the clear statement that syntactic structures, including the object as a dependent of the verb phrase, are caused by a genetic mutation in humans. Chomsky as a young linguist Chomsky's interest in language started at an early age. When he was twelve, he studied Hebrew grammar under his father. He also studied Arabic in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1947, he met Zellig Harris, the founder of the college's linguistics department. Harris was an established linguist. He did research in the way laid out by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. He let Chomsky proofread a copy of his book Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951). This is how Chomsky came to know a formal theory of linguistics. He soon decided to major in the subject. For his thesis, Chomsky set out to apply Harris's methods to Hebrew. Following Harris's advice, he studied logic, philosophy, and mathematics. He found Harris's views on language much like Nelson Goodman's work on philosophical systems. Chomsky was also influenced by the works of W. V. O. Quine and Rudolf Carnap. Quine showed that one cannot completely verify the meaning of a statement through observations. Carnap had developed a formal theory of language. It used symbols and rules that did not refer to meaning. From there on, Chomsky tried to build a grammar of