biography
| name: |
Chomsky, (Avram) Noam
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1928– )
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| biography:
| 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 (1951–5), 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 later to the Persian Gulf War. His extensive writings in this area include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (1978). |
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