Noam Chomsky

Chomsky, Noam (1928- ), American linguist, educator, and political activist. Chomsky is the founder of transformational-generative grammar, a system that revolutionized modern linguistics.

Avram Noah Chomsky was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in linguistics in 1955 under the direction of American linguist Zellig Harris. While still a graduate student, Chomsky held an appointment from 1951 to 1955 as a junior fellow at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955 to teach French and German. In 1976 he became Institute Professor of Linguistics at MIT.

Chomsky created and established a new field of linguistics, generative grammar, based on a theory he worked on during the 1950s. In 1957 he published this theory, called transformational-generative grammar, in his book Syntactic Structures. Chomsky made a distinction between the innate, often unconscious knowledge people have of their own language and the way in which they use the language in reality. The former, which he termed competence, enables people to generate all possible grammatical sentences. The latter, which he called performance, is the transformation of this competence into everyday speech. Prior to Chomsky, most theories about the structure of language described performance; they were transformational grammars. Chomsky proposed that linguistic theory also should explain the mental processes that underlie the use of language—in other words, the nature of language itself, or generative grammar.

Chomsky placed linguistics at the core of studies of the mind. He claimed that linguistic theory must account for universal similarities between all languages and for the fact that children are able to learn language fluently at an early age in spite of insufficient data that has no systematic logic. His contribution to the cognitive sciences—fields that seek to understand how we think, learn, and perceive—emerges from this claim. Of equal importance were Chomsky’s arguments that a serious theory of mental processes should replace empiricism, the belief that experience is the source of knowledge, as the dominant model in American science.

Chomsky wrote on politics early in his life but began to publish more on the subject during the 1960s in response to United States policies in Southeast Asia. He deliberately scaled back his work on linguistics to dedicate more time to writing about the role of the media and academic communities in “manufacturing” the consent of the general public for U.S. policies. Chomsky also addressed the effects of U.S. foreign policy, and he felt that intellectuals have a responsibility to use scientific method in criticizing government policies that they find immoral and to develop practical strategies to combat these policies.

Chomsky’s more important publications, in addition to Syntactic Structures, include Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), American Power and the New Mandarins (1967), Peace in the Middle East (1974), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), The Fateful Triangle (1983) Deterring Democracy (1991), and The Minimalist Program (1995).