We have seen in chapter 2 how Bloomfield's concept of the morpheme was transformed by his immediate successors (above, §2.3). But we have yet to consider contemporary developments in syntax. Once again a part of Bloomfield's theory was taken from its context and made the foundation of the whole. In morphology it was the morpheme, so that an account of morphology, insofar as it remained distinct from syntax, was reduced to the identification of morphemes and their alternants. In syntax it was, above all, the principle of immediate constituents. From the late 1940s syntax had basically two tasks, one to establish the hierarchical structure of sentences and the other to sort the units of this hierarchy into classes with equivalent distributions. For the same period also saw the firm adoption of distributional criteria. Not merely did the study of language start from form rather than from meaning; but the investigation of form was separated strictly from that of meaning, and necessarily preceded it. It was in syntax that this programme was particularly attractive, and met with the fewest doubts and criticisms.

Of the sections which follow, §3.1 deals with the origins of distributionalism, up to and including the classic Post-Bloomfieldian treatments in the 1950s. In §3.2, we will see how these ideas gave rise, again in the 1950s, to the concept of a generative grammar. This section will concentrate, in particular, on Harris's Methods (1951a) and Chomsky's first book (1957). We will then turn to the development of the constituency model, which culminated in the formalisation of phrase structure grammar (§3.3).