9

MOUTON EXPANDS

with your proposals and remarks. I have sequentially numbered the footnotes by chapter. Chomsky’s method of using references in the notes is indeed quite ugly, but seems (sadly) to be being used more and more. I am having the manuscript of the footnotes retyped, with the full references, final numbering, etc., and then the manuscript can be sent to the typesetter.] In a letter, dated November 3, 1959, De Ridder expresses himself to Van Schooneveld, who was no proponent of publishing Syntactic structures, rather cautiously concerning Chomsky and states in general terms: ‘Je weet dat de financiering van werken van zeer goed gehalte nu eenmaal moet worden mogelijk gemaakt door het uitgeven van boeken van mindere kwaliteit.’ 17 [‘To be realistic, you know that financing works of very good quality must be made possible by publishing books of lesser quality.’] Chomsky published a total of four books in Janua linguarum: Syntactic structures (1957), Current issues in linguistic theory (1964), Topics in the the ory of generative grammar (1966) and Studies on semantics in generative grammar (1972). Mouton also was interested in Chomsky’s dissertation Logical structure of linguistic theory (1955). In a letter, dated September 12, 1957 (received on September 25, 1957 by Van Schooneveld in Belgrade, according to a note on the letter) Chomsky writes that he has a ‘tentative agreement’ with North Holland Publishers to publish it, ‘if it meets their length requirements (i.e., if it’s shortened sufficiently)’, but that he does not want to commit to anything because he is still not pleased with the present state of the manuscript. 18 Possibly, he continues, the manuscript would be ready sometime during 1958. It would ultimately take until 1975 for the book to come out in New York with Plenum Press, even after Mouton had tried until 1965 to publish it itself anyway. Moreover, Chomsky had once suggested himself that he could not get his Logical structure of linguistic the ory published. 19

3. Mouton expands Mouton did not just publish many books in the field of Slavistics; the pub lisher also had a unique connection with the Slavic area itself: the countries behind the then-iron Curtain. In 1953, at the same time as the publishing house, an antiquarian bookstore specializing in Slavistics and books from