Who is Noam Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky, born Avram Noam Chomsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 7 December 1928, is an influential linguist, professor, author, and activist. He was Institute Professor as well as Professor of Linguistics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chomsky has lectured and resided at many universities worldwide. Chomsky earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a PhD in linguistics. Chomsky has authored 35 books since 1955. Some of his best known books include The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Language and Mind, and American Power and the New Mandarins. Imperial Ambitions and Failed States were published in 2006. Chomsky’s approach to linguistics stems from rationalist philosophy, which holds that the mind is not a blank slate at birth, dependent on experience and learning, but rather is pre-equipped with knowledge universal to human nature
by ROGER SCRUTON Tuesday, September 26, 2006 12:01 A.M. EDT Noam Chomsky’s popularity owes little or nothing to the eminent place that he occupies in the world of ideas. That place was won many years ago in the science of linguistics, and no expert in the subject would, I think, dispute Prof. Chomsky’s title to it. He swept away at a stroke the attempts of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers to identify meaning through the surface structure of signs, as well as the belief, once prevalent among animal ethologists, that language could be acquired by making piecemeal connections between symbols and things. He argued that language is an all-or-nothing affair, that we are equipped by evolution with the categories needed to acquire it, and that these categories govern the “deep structure” of our discourse, no matter what language we learn. Sentences emerge by the repeated operations of a “transformational grammar” that translates deep structure into surface sequences: As a result, all of
Three different people mentioned the name of Noam Chomsky this past few days and asked me what I thought of him. I had never heard of him. I promised to look at what he had to say but didn’t get around to it. Then last night 5/4/99, I dreamed that I was making a web page about Noam Chomsky with a flowered background, but not just about him, there were links to pages about what individuals had to say also in response. So, herein, I present Noam Chomsky!
