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https://chomsky.info/2002

Childhood
1928–1945 Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[20] His parents, Ze'ev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants.[21] William had fled the Russian Empire in 1913 to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending university.[22] After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son.[23] Elsie was a teacher and activist born in Belarus. They met at Mikveh Israel, where they both worked.[21]

University
1945–1955

Carol Schatz, whom Chomsky married in 1949 In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic.[37] Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew.[38] Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine,[39] but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris, whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject.[40] Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language.[41] Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book.[42] He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.[43]

Recent career
'''University of Arizona: '2017–present' In 2017, Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in Tucson[143] and was later hired as a part-time professor in the linguistics department there, with his duties including teaching and public seminars.[144] His salary is covered by philanthropic donations.[145] Chomsky signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins in 2018.[146][147] Numbered list item Linguistic theory What started as purely linguistic research ... has led, through involvement in political causes and an identification with an older philosophic tradition, to no less than an attempt to formulate an overall theory of man. The roots of this are manifest in the linguistic theory ... The discovery of cognitive structures common to the human race but only to humans (species specific), leads quite easily to thinking of unalienable human attributes. Edward Marcotte on the significance of Chomsky's linguistic theory[148] The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited.[149] As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.[150] In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species.[151][152] Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism",[153] which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli.[148]

Universal grammar Main article: Universal grammar Since the 1960s Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language.[154] To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks the language acquisition device, and suggested that one of linguists' tasks should be to determine what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar".[155][156][157] Multiple scholars have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language,[158] the lack of universal characteristics between languages,[159] and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and the structures of specific languages.[160] Scholar Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based in logic and not empiricism.[161]

Transformational-generative grammar Main articles: Transformational grammar, Generative grammar, Chomsky hierarchy, and Minimalist program Transformational-generative grammar is a broad theory used to model, encode, and deduce a native speaker's linguistic capabilities.[162] These models, or "formal grammars", show the abstract structures of a specific language as they may relate to structures in other languages.[163] Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades.[162] "Transformations" refers to syntactic relationships within language, e.g., being able to infer that the subject between two sentences is the same person.[164] Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures: Outward-facing surface structures relate phonetic rules into sound, while inward-facing deep structures relate words and conceptual meaning. Transformational-generative grammar uses mathematical notation to express the rules that govern the connection between meaning and sound (deep and surface structures, respectively). By this theory, linguistic principles can mathematically generate potential sentences structures in a language.[148]

The Chomsky hierarchy Set inclusions described by the Chomsky hierarchy Based on this rule-based notation of grammars, Chomsky grouped natural languages into a series of four nested subsets and increasingly complex types, together known as the Chomsky hierarchy. This classification was and remains foundational to formal language theory,[165] and relevant to theoretical computer science, especially programming language theory,[166] compiler construction, and automata theory.[167]

Following transformational grammar's heyday through the mid-1970s, a derivative[162] government and binding theory became a dominant research framework through the early 1990s, remaining an influential theory,[162] when linguists turned to a "minimalist" approach to grammar. This research focused on the principles and parameters framework, which explained children's ability to learn any language by filling open parameters (a set of universal grammar principles) that adapt as the child encounters linguistic data.[168] The minimalist program, initiated by Chomsky,[169] asks which minimal principles and parameters theory fits most elegantly, naturally, and simply.[168] In an attempt to simplify language into a system that relates meaning and sound using the minimum possible faculties, Chomsky dispenses with concepts such as "deep structure" and "surface structure" and instead emphasizes the plasticity of the brain's neural circuits, with which come an infinite number of concepts, or "logical forms".[152] When exposed to linguistic data, a hearer-speaker's brain proceeds to associate sound and meaning, and the rules of grammar we observe are in fact only the consequences, or side effects, of the way language works. Thus, while much of Chomsky's prior research focused on the rules of language, he now focuses on the mechanisms the brain uses to generate these rules and regulate speech.[152][170]