Noam Chomsky is a US political theorist and activist, and institute professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides his work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics” and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928. His parents were Jewish. Her mother was part of the radical activism back in1930s. His uncle owned a newsstand that worked as an “ intellectual center”. For this we deduce where his critical thinking to politics came from. His father was an eminent scholar, who taught Hebrew.
Chomsky first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.
In 1957, Chomsky published a book called Syntactic Structures, book that started a revolution in linguistics. According to his transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to “deep structures,” a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., “John saw Mary”) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was seen by John”). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a “Minimalist Program” in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.
Some of his books are:
· American Power and the new Mandarines
· The Architecture of language
· At war with Asia,
· Aspects of theory of syntax
· Barriers, Fail State: the abuse of Power and the abuse of Democracy.
Chomsky is reported, in recent surveys, to be the most cited of all living authors, ranking in fact with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities.
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