Neither the title here nor the article itself claim it to be his first book, only an incredibly influential one. The article even agrees with you: > §3 sets o

Neither the title here nor the article itself claim it to be his first book, only an incredibly influential one. The article even agrees with you: > §3 sets out a radically revised structure for transformational grammars, quietly abandoning the notion of “kernel sentence” from Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, and introducing the term “deep structure,” which in a sense replaces it.