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Birth of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky was born on December 07, 1928 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is an American theoretical linguist from the 1950 that influenced the field of linguistics by treating language as uniquely human. He received his Ph.D. and some of his notable works are the Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), Principles & Parameters, and the Minimalist Program. -
Entering the University of Pennsylvania
Noam Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 16 to study linguistics. -
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Education of Noam Chomsky
He attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1945 to 1955. -
Noam Chomsky's Mentor
Chomsky met a Russian-born linguist named Zellig Harris in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in it. -
Master's Thesis
Chomsky completed his master’s thesis The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951 which was a revised version of his Bachelor of Arts thesis with Zellig Harris’s methods applied. -
Ph.D. in Linguistics Awarded
He received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1955 after submitting one chapter of the Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT) as a doctoral dissertation. The LSLT is considering grammar to be a set of rules that produces combination of words that for grammatical sentences in each language and integrates the use of defined operations called “transformations” to create newer sentences from current sentences. -
MIT Career Started
Noam Chomsky started his early career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a teaching position that progressed his credibility. He developed a book of his lectures that he gave to MIT undergraduates titled Syntactic Structures. It was a compilation of everything that he had learned on linguistics from Harris along with the LSLT, and it improved the scientific study of language. Later in the mid-1960s, he published the Aspect of the Theory of Syntax and the Cartesian Linguistics. -
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Principles and Parameters
In the late 1970s to early 1980, Noam Chomsky worked with others to create an effective solution utilizing a theoretical framework know as “Principles and Parameters” (P&P). It offered a solution to Plato’s problem with grammar between different languages that became universal with P&P. The information from P&P provided a sensorimotor interface that allows humans to understand different languages and take in speech, such as listening to elaborate stories or enjoying poetry. -
Minimalist Program
Noam Chomsky introduced the “minimalist program” (MP) in the early 1990s. It was an attempt to simplify the symbolic representation of the language facility. -
Contributions to the Philosophy of Science
Noam Chomsky is considered the founder of modern linguistics with his contributions towards the philosophy of science with linguistics. He has published many notable works from the Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory to the Minimalist Program. His work with the study of language and mind garnered vast adoption within the field of linguistics. He provided a mental aspect on how language is interpreted biologically among humans which he deemed “universal grammar”....