Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky , 1928-, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia. Chomsky, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, developed a theory of transformational (sometimes called generative or transformational-generative) grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language. He first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.

According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to "deep structures," a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., "John saw Mary" ) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning ( "Mary was seen by John" ). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a "Minimalist Program" in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility. Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), Knowledge of Language (1986), Language and Thought (1993), and Architecture of Language (2000).

Chomsky also has wide-ranging political interests. An early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and a vociferous opponent of the Iraq war, he has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), Rogue States (2000), Hegemony or Survival (2003), and Failed States (2006). Chomsky's controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States.

Bibliography: See biography by R. F. Barsky (1997); interviews with D. Barsamian (1992, 1994, 1996, and 2001); studies by F. D'Agostino (1985), C. P. Otero (1988 and 1998), R. Salkie (1990), M. Achbar, ed. (1994), M. Rai (1995), V. J. Cook (1996), P. Wilkin (1997), J. McGilvray (1999), N. V. Smith (1999), A. Edgley (2000), and H. Lasnik (2000); Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (film by P. Wintonick and M. Achbar, 1992) and Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (documentary film dir. by J. Junkerman, 2002).

Chomsky, Noam (1928– ), professor of modern languages and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after Saussure the most important figure in modern linguistics. Two of his books, in particular, proposed a radically new view of the nature and analysis of language: Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). Following on from the systems of grammatical analysis developed by L. Bloomfield and Chomsky's teacher Zelling Harris, Chomsky's ‘generative grammar’ proposes a set of ‘deep structure’ grammatical rules which produce a set of sentences at the ‘surface structure’ of language. A grammar of a language would be a set of rules which generates ‘all and only the correct sentences of the language’. The significance of his emphasis is that it brings linguistic analysis closer to analyses of mental operations such as are conducted by psychologists and logicians.