Avram Noam Chomsky, born 1928, is a renowned linguist who has made important contributions to the field over the course of his career. He is known for his work on the cognitive abilities of language, and his work has had a significant impact on the field of linguistics.
Through his work in linguistics and related fields, including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky helped to initiate and sustain what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution.” His analyses of the pernicious influence of economic elites on U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture also gained him a worldwide following.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school where he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. At the age of 10, he wrote a commentary for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. Chomsky’s research over the course of the next few years was thorough enough to serve as the basis for his critical review of a study of the period, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969).
When Chomsky was 13, he began taking trips to New York City by himself, where he found books to read and made connections with a thriving Jewish intellectual community. In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania but found little to engage him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind after meeting the linguist Zellig S.
Chomsky then adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science, and transformed them into something novel. In his 1951 master’s thesis, “The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew”, and especially in “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory” (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55).
Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956, he was appointed to a teaching position at MIT that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, but he was openly skeptical of its prospects. The University of Massachusetts asked Chomsky and Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.
Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American behaviorism, is generally regarded as the definitive rebuttal of behaviorist theories of language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind began to gain 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.
Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement.
Chomsky began teaching at the University of Arizona in 2017. One of the most highly respected scholars in the world, Chomsky has had a profound impact on a range of academic disciplines. He is widely recognized for his contributions to the cognitive revolution, which has led to the development of a new cognitivist framework for the study of language and the mind.
He continues to be a leading scholar, critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary state capitalism, and U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he remains a leading voice in mainstream news media. Chomsky’s ideas have a significant impact on the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.
