CHOMSKY, (Avram) Noam

CHOMSKY, (Avram) Noam [b. 1928]. American linguist and political writer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and introduced to philology by his father, a scholar of Hebrew. At the U. of Pennsylvania he studied under the structural linguist Zellig Harris. After gaining his Ph.D. in 1955 (dissertation: ‘Transformational Analysis’), he taught modern languages and LINGUISTICS at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became full professor in 1961. He was appointed Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in 1976. During this period, he became a leading figure in US linguistics, replacing a mechanistic and behaviouristic view of language (based on the work of Bloomfield) with a mentalistic and generative approach. His linguistic publications include: Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1968, 1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975), Reflections on Language (1975), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), Barriers (1986). His social, political, and economic works include: American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), The Political Economy of Human Rights (two volumes, 1979). Language and Responsibility (1979) combines his linguistic and social interests by exploring relationships among language, science, ideas, and politics.

Chomsky originated such concepts as TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR (TGG), transformational grammar (TG), and generative grammar. His definition of GRAMMAR differs from both traditional and structuralist theories, in that he is concerned not only with a formal descriptive system but also with the linguistic structures and processes at work in the mind. He sees such structures as universal and arising from a genetic predisposition to language. Features drawn from mathematics include transformation and generation. As proposed in 1957, transformational rules were a means by which one kind of sentence (such as the passive The work was done by local men) could be derived from another kind (such as the active Local men did the work). Any process governed by such rules was a transformation (in the preceding case the passivization transformation) and any sentence resulting from such rules was a transform. In Chomsky's terms, previous grammars had only phrase-structure rules, which specified how sentences are structured out of phrases and phrases out of words, but had no way of relating sentences with different structures (such as active and passive).

Such earlier grammars were also concerned only with actual attested sentences and not with all the potential sentences in a language. An adequate grammar, however, in his view, should generate (that is, explicitly account for) the indefinite set of acceptable sentences of a language, rather than the finite set to be found in a corpus of texts. Aspects (1965) presented what is known as his ‘standard theory’, which added the concepts deep structure and surface structure: deep or underlying forms which by transformation become surface or observable sentences of a particular language. In this theory, a passive was no longer to be derived from an active sentence, but both from a common deep structure which was neither active nor passive. Comparably, sentences with similar surface structures, such as John is easy to please and John is eager to please were shown to have different deep structures. The standard theory distinguishes between a speaker's competence (knowledge of a language) and performance (actual use of a language), Chomskyan grammar being concerned with competence, not performance.

Subsequent work has concentrated less on rules that specify what can be generated and more on constraints that determine what cannot be generated. A definitive statement of his recent views is Lectures on Government and Binding, in which the theory is GB theory. Government is an extension of the traditional term whereby a verb governs its object, but for Chomsky prepositions may govern and subjects may be governed. Binding is concerned with the type of anaphora found with pronouns and reflexives, but the notion is greatly extended. The traditional notion of case is similarly used, though modified in that it need not be morphological. Such devices can be used to rule out ungrammatical sentences that might otherwise be generated. Barriers (1986) extends GB theory.

Chomsky is widely considered to be the most influential figure in linguistics in the later 20c and is probably the linguist bestknown outside the field. His views on language and grammar are controversial and responses to them have ranged from extreme enthusiasm, sometimes verging on fanaticism, through a sober and reflective interest, to fierce rejection by some traditionalist, structuralist, and other critics. See. CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE, LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS.