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Avarm Noam Chomsky Birth
Avram Noam Chomsky, (born December 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. American theoretical linguist whose work from the 1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. -
Early Interest!
At the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered to pursue his political interests, by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine. -
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Things falling into place!
Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting a chapter of LSLT as a Transformational Analysis. In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he felt that his work was “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). -
Wave of a NEW Approach
Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He retired as professor emeritus in 2002. -
Standard and Extended Standard Theory
Chomsky’s attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were presented in the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent “extended standard theory,” developed and revised through the late 1970s. Theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar, of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to the child is exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed grammars.