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Noam Chomsky is Born!
Noam Chomsky was born December 7th, 1928. -
Earning a PhD.
Noam Chomsky earned his Phd in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. It was during the years of 1951-1955 that Chomsky became a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows, where he completed his doctoral dissertation. This was titled "Transformational Analysis" , and appeared in the monograph titled "Syntactic Structure." -
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Chomsky was heard everywhere!
During these years, Chomsky delivered many lectures starting with the John Locke Lectures at Oxford. Following this were lectures in various places such as Cambridge Universtiy, New Dheli, and Leiden. Chomsky has since earned 20+ honorary degrees. -
Father of the Cognitive Revolution.
In 1959, Chomsky published a review of B.F. Skinner's book titled "Verbal Behavior". Many assoiciate this review of Chomsky's to be what helped spark the "Cognitive Revolution." The cognitive revolution provoked a new paradigm shift away from the dominant way of thinking and methodologies and guided the way philosophers would view language. Here is short video of an interview with Noam Chomsky. https://youtu.be/E3U6MsdBalg?si=YIc_hOu3qbzbkzJp -
The Language Faculty
Chomsky helped restructure the way that we study grammar. In fact, because of Chomsky, our primary object of study in linguistics is something called the "Language Faculty", defined as "a postulated mental organ which is dedicated to acquiring linguistic knowledge and is involved in various aspects of language-use, including the production and understanding of utterances." [1]. In 1981 Chomsky defined the initial state of the language faculty as a set of principles and parameters. -
Citations
[1] Hornstein, Norbert. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1998, chomsky.info/1998____. [2] MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Noam Chomsky. 2002, chomsky.info/2002____. [3] Bolhuis, Johan J., et al. “Language and Learning: The Cognitive Revolution at 60‐odd.” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 98, no. 3, 2023, pp. 931–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12936. -
Major Works
{1} Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures, The Hague: Mouton. (First work on Transformational Grammar.) {2} Chomsky, N. (1959) ‘Review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner’, Language 35: 26-58.(A critique of behaviourist approaches to learning.) {3} Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.(Outlines the Standard Model.) {4} Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Chomsky’s best current text on Minimalism.).