Linguist, and social and political theorist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The son of a distinguished Hebrew scholar, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was especially influenced by Zellig Harris. After taking his MA there (1951), he spent four years as a junior fellow at Harvard (19515), then was awarded a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1955). That year he began a long teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became known as one of the principal founders of transformational-generative grammar, a system of linguistic analysis that challenges much traditional linguistics and has much to do with philosophy, logic, and psycholinguistics. His book Syntactic Structures (1957) was credited with revolutionizing the discipline of linguistics. His theory also argued that the means for acquiring a language is innate in all humans and is triggered as soon as an infant begins to learn the basics of a language. Later works include Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Language and Mind (1968), Knowledge of Language (1986), and On Nature and Language (2002). Early on he began to promote his radical critique of American political, social, and economic policies, particularly of American foreign policy as effected by the Establishment and presented by the media. He was outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, and later to the Iraq War. His writings on these include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (1978), and Imperial Ambitions (2005).
| Avram Noam Chomsky | |
|---|---|
| Noam Chomsky | |
| Born |
December 7, 1928 East Oak Lane, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Linguist |
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th century. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman, Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power.
Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known - especially internationally - for his media criticism and radical politics than for his linguistic theories. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most cited scholar overall. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist and a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism (he is a member of the IWW).
Biography
Chomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in the United States and spoke "ordinary New York English". Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and anti-Semitism in the mid-1930s, stating, "I don't like to say it but I grew up with a kind of visceral fear of Catholics.
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at the age of ten about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia (184th Class), in 1945 Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from philosophers C. Chomsky subsequently reinterpreted these as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky.
In 1949, Chomsky married linguist Carol Schatz.
Chomsky received his Ph.D.
Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). Chomsky has been teaching at MIT continuously for the last 50 years.
It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics: he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" in The New York Review of Books in 1967. Since that time, Chomsky has become well known for his political views, speaking on politics all over the world and writing numerous books.
Chomsky has in the past received various death threats because of his criticisms of U.S foreign policy. during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. Chomsky also states that he frequently receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, though Chomsky himself states that he does not agree with the police protection.
Despite his criticisms, Chomsky has stated that he continues to reside in the United States because he believes it remains the "greatest country in the world," a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." Chomsky travels frequently, giving lectures on politics. Chomsky has acknowledged this criticism, seeing it more as a virtue: "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important.
In 2003 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Contributions to linguistics
Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) — developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) — make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters", Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States of America. (Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such grammatical judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually Spanish, English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages. However, as Chomsky has said:
The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly detailed effort in 1949–50. The second was to the native American language Hidatsa (the first full-scale generative grammar), mid-50s. MIT in fact became the international center of work on Australian Aboriginal languages within a generative framework [...] thanks to the work of Ken Hale, who also initiated some of the most far-reaching work on Native American languages, also within our program; in fact the first program that brought native speakers to the university to become trained professional linguists, so that they could do work on their own languages, in far greater depth than had ever been done before. Since that time, particularly since the 1980s, it constitutes the vast bulk of work on the widest typological variety of languages.
Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied, and many changes in generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of languages analyzed. The existence of linguistic universals in syntax, which is the core of Chomsky's claim, is still highly disputed. One of the prime motivations behind an alternative approach, the functional-typological approach or linguistic typology (often associated with Joseph Greenberg), is to base hypotheses of linguistic universals on the study of as wide a variety of the world's languages as possible, to classify the variation seen, and to form theories based on the results of this classification. The Chomskyan approach is too in-depth and reliant on native speaker knowledge to follow this method, though it has over time been applied to a broad range of languages.
Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).
His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English, written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). Though extremely influential in its day, this work is considered outdated (though it has recently been reprinted), and Chomsky does not publish on phonology anymore.
Contributions to psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative explanation of language in behavioral terms. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83-99). This and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties; As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and`naturalization of philosophy" (quoted in Barsky- Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture.
Opinion on criticism of science culture
Chomsky strongly disagrees with post-structuralist and postmodern criticisms of science:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of;
Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science", stating that they are much like the anti-Semitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik movement:
In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics".
Chomsky's influence in other fields
Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ...
Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named in honor of Chomsky.
Political views
Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed a wide range of opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those which the powerful "don't want to be heard" and for this reason he is often termed and considered an American political dissident. Some highlights of his political views:
Much of his political writings offer very strong criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States. Chomsky argues that while the U.S. may preach democracy and freedom for all, the U.S. has a history of doing exactly the opposite by promoting, supporting and allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states. He has opposed the U.S. global war on drugs, claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "The war on certain drugs".Chomsky has made connections between his linguistics research and more political topics. An example is a 1971 debate with French philosopher Michel Foucault on the question of human nature, where Chomsky used the idea of innate linguistic capacity to criticize the idea that all human values and knowledge are entirely conditioned by societal conditions. However, Chomsky makes such connections only rarely, and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. 21)
On September 20, 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Chomsky's book entitled Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance a sales boost, raising it to first place on the Amazon.com bestsellers list after he recommended it during his speech at the U.N. The New York Times erroneously reported that Chavez said he regretted not being able to meet Chomsky before his death, not knowing he was still alive.
Criticism of Chomsky's politics
Chomsky has acquired many critics from both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. Chomsky has argued that his actions in the Faurisson affair were limited to a defense of the rights of free expression of someone he disagrees with, and that critics subsequently subjected this limited defence to various interpretations. His critics contend that Chomsky went further than a defence of free speech, effectively protecting the character of a holocaust denier as well as supporting the legitimacy of his research.
In the late 1970s he was accused of apologism for the Khmer Rouge, after he and Edward S.
Chomsky has also received criticism from many revolutionary anarchists who claim he is too much of a reformist, in that he encourages some level of participation in the electoral system.
Academic achievements, awards and honors
In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University;
Noam Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from the most prestigious universities around the world, including the following: University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, , University of Maine, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, Universidad de Chile, University of Calcutta, Universidad Nacional De Colombia, and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Early in his career Chomsky was granted the prestigious MacArthur Award.
Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect.
Authors on Chomsky
Rai, Milan (1995). [Broken Chomsky's Politics]. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. "Review of Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, by Robert Barsky". "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky". Wittgensteinians and Chomskyans: In Defence of Mentalism, Language in Mind and Language in Society. "For and Against Chomsky" (PDF). Review of Government in the Future, by Noam Chomsky. A Departure from cognitivism: Implications of Chomsky's second revolution in linguistics.Bibliography
Linguistics
See a full bibliography on Chomsky's MIT homepage . Chomsky (1955). Chomsky (1955). Chomsky, Noam, Morris Halle, and Fred Lukoff (1956). The Hague: Mouton Chomsky (1957). Chomsky (1964). Chomsky (1965). Chomsky (1965). Chomsky (1966). Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle (1968). Chomsky (1968). Chomsky (1972). Chomsky (1975). Chomsky (1975). Chomsky (1977). Chomsky (1979). Chomsky (1980). Chomsky (1981). Chomsky (1982). Chomsky (1982). Chomsky (1982). Noam Chomsky on The Generative Enterprise, A discussion with Riny Hyybregts and Henk van Riemsdijk. Chomsky (1984). Chomsky (1986). Chomsky (1986). Chomsky (1993). Chomsky (1995). Chomsky (1998). Chomsky (2000). Chomsky (2000). Chomsky (2001). Chomsky, N. Chomsky: selected readings (1971). The Chomsky Reader (1987). Language and Politics (1988). Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (2002). Chomsky on Anarchism (2005) Government in the future. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.
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