The author shows how in the course of the last quarter century Chomsky has veered from his original exercise the essential aim of which was the enumeration of the grammatical sentences of a language, to another where actual enumeration is overshadowed by the search for constraints that so limit the power of operations that they be compatible with neuronal reality. The author tries to identify the few principles that can, in her eyes, be candidates for the construction of such constraints: in particular, she picks out principles of formally-remarkable category, of critical distance, uniqueness, maximality and identity.