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.
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.