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Birth- December 7th, 1928
Noam Chomsky is an American intellectual that made discoveries in linguistics, political activism, and philosophy. In Chomsky’s early work he focused on linguistics publishing his first book in 1957 called Syntactic Structures, which launched the cognitive revolution. His book aims to construct “a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis” (Chomsky, 11).
(Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 1957) -
Language Acquisition- 1960s
In the 1960s Noam Chomsky claimed that humans have an instinctive mental capacity that lets infants learn and produce original language. This is named language acquisition device (LAD).
(Nigel Warbuton, Noam Chomsky on Language Acquisition, Youtube, BBC Radio 4, Jan 22, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=99&v=7Cgpfw4z8cw&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fworldenglishes.lmc.gatech.edu%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title) -
Chomsky Foucault Debate on Power vs. Justice -1971
Chomsky was an advocate for the philosophy of science and the mind. Foucault proposed that human nature is connected to our society, culture, and conceptions of ourselves, whereas Chomsky argued human nature is a more universal moral standard we deduce through reasoning.
(Noam Chomsky & Michael Foucault, Chomsky Foucault Debate on Power vs. Justice (1971), Youtube, Philosophy Overdose, July 20, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVQ3l5P0A4&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose) -
Biolinguistics- May 17th, 2004
Noam Chomsky’s main theory resides in biolinguistics. At a conference in 2004, Chomsky argued that all humans share the same universal linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.
(Noam Chomsky, Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity, Delivered at MTA, Budapest, May 17, 2004, https://chomsky.info/20040517/)