Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics.

[2] It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal (i.e. based on the manipulation of symbols and rules) discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope.

From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.

Edward S. Klima, a graduate of the Masters program from Harvard and hired by Chomsky at RLE in 1957, produced pioneering TGG-based work on negation.

[4] In 1959, Chomsky wrote a critical review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) in the journal Language, in which he emphasized on the fundamentally human characteristic of verbal creativity, which is present even in very young children, and rejected the behaviorist way of describing language in ambiguous terms such as "stimulus", "response", "habit", "conditioning", and "reinforcement".

Viertel's English translations of Humboldt's works influenced Chomsky at this time and made him abandon Saussurian views of linguistics.

[6] Chomsky also collaborated with visiting French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, and was able to formulate one of the most important theorems of formal linguistics, the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy.

Within the theoretical framework of TGG, G. H. Matthews, Chomsky's colleague at RLE, worked on the grammar of Hidatsa, a Native American language.

All of these activities aided to develop what is now known as the "Standard Theory" of TGG, in which the basic formulations of Syntactic Structures underwent considerable revision.

In Aspects, Chomsky lays down the abstract, idealized context in which a linguistic theorist is supposed to perform his research: "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance."

"[14] In Aspects Chomsky writes that "linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior.

In the second step, the empty terminal nodes are filled with complex symbols consisting of morphemes accompanied by syntactic and semantic features, supplied from the lexicon via lexical insertion rules.

Secondly, the addition of a semantic component to the grammar marked an important conceptual change since Syntactic Structures, where the role of meaning was effectively neglected and not considered part of the grammatical model.

Among the more technical innovations are the use of recursive phrase structure rules and the introduction of syntactic features in lexical entries to address the issue of subcategorization.

In Chapter 2 of Aspects, Chomsky discusses the problem of subcategorization of lexical categories and how this information should be captured in a generalized manner in the grammar.

[2] University of Cambridge linguists Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull maintain that Aspects ushered in the "Second Cognitive Revolution—the revival of rationalist philosophy first expounded in the Enlightenment", in particular by Leibniz.

[24] In his Nobel Prize lecture titled "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", the 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology Niels K. Jerne used Chomsky's generative grammar model in Aspects to explain the human immune system, comparing "the variable region of a given antibody molecule" to "a sentence".

[26] Several of the theoretical constructs and principles of the generative grammar introduced in Aspects such as deep structures, transformations, autonomy and primacy of syntax, etc.

were either abandoned or substantially revised after they were shown to be either inadequate or too complicated to account for, in a simple and elegant way, many idiosyncratic example sentences from different languages.

[27] As a response to these problems encountered within the Standard Theory, a new approach called the generative semantics (as opposed to the interpretive semantics in Aspects) was invented in the early 1970s by some of Chomsky's collaborators (notably George Lakoff[28]), and was incorporated later in the late 1980s into what is now known as the school of cognitive linguistics, at odds with Chomskyan school of generative linguistics.