Noam Chomsky

Image:Noam chomsky.jpg Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, often considered the most significant contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics of the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, which challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman, Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the so-called Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power.

Along with his linguistics work, Chomsky is also widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist, a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism, and is often considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of American politics.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth most cited source overall.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Chomsky's name 2 Contributions to linguistics 2.1 Generative grammar 2.2 Chomsky hierarchy 3 Contributions to psychology 4 Opinion on criticism of science culture 5 Chomsky's influence in other fields 6 Political views 7 Criticism of Noam Chomsky 8 Academic Achievements, Awards and Honors 9 Bibliography 9.1 Linguistics 10 Filmography 11 See also 12 External links

Biography

Image:Chomsky small child (fair-use).jpg Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine later wiped out by the Nazis. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now called Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in America and normally spoke "ordinary New York English". Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature."

At the age of eight or nine, Chomsky spent every Friday night reading Hebrew literature. [1] Later in life he would teach Hebrew classes. In spite of this, and of all the linguistic work carried out during his career, Chomsky claims "the only language I speak and write proficiently is English."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at the age of ten about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona. From the age of twelve or thirteen he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

Starting in 1945, he studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from philosophers C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky subsequently reinterpreted these as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris' political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky.

In 1949, Chomsky married linguist Carol Schatz. They have two daughters, Aviva (1957) and Diane (1960), and a son, Harry (1967).

Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted much of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, perhaps his best-known work in the field of linguistics. Image:Chomsky young with parents (fair-use).jpg

Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. Chomsky has been teaching at MIT continuously for the last 50 years.

It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics: he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" [2] in The New York Review of Books in 1967. Since that time, Chomsky has become well known for his political views, speaking on politics all over the world, and writing numerous books. His far-reaching criticism of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power has made him a controversial figure. He has a devoted following among the left, but he has also come under increasing criticism from liberals as well as from the right, particularly because of his response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Chomsky's name

Avram (אברם) is a Hebrew name meaning "high father" (English: "Abram") taken from the biblical forefather figure (see Genesis 12:1) later known as Avraham meaning "father of many" (English: "Abraham") (see Genesis 17:5). Noam (נועם) is a Hebrew name which means "pleasantness" (male version of the female No'omi — English: "Naomi" or "Noemi"). Chomsky is the Russian name Хомский. The original pronunciation is IPA: /avram noam 'xomskij/. This is normally Anglicized to IPA: /'ævɹæm 'nəʊm 'tʃɒm^pski/ (Image:Loudspeaker.png listen), or IPA: /'ævɻæm 'noʊm 'tʃam^pski/ in an American accent, which is how Chomsky himself pronounces it (Image:Loudspeaker.png listen).

The eponymous adjective Chomskyan has come to be used to refer to his ideas, a term Chomsky has disparaged as making "no sense" and belonging "to the history of organized religion." The term is generally used in reference to his linguistic, rather than political, ideas.

Contributions to linguistics

Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterised by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesised to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modelling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) — developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) — make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters" , Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping it from all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasises principles of economy and optimal design , reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States. Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language. (Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such grammaticality judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages. However, as Chomsky has said:

The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly detailed effort in 1949–50. The second was to the native American language Hidatsa (the first full-scale generative grammar), mid-50s. The third was to Turkish, our first Ph.D. dissertation, early 60s. After that research on a wide variety of languages took off. MIT in fact became the international center of work on Australian Aboriginal languages within a generative framework [...] thanks to the work of Ken Hale, who also initiated some of the most far-reaching work on Native American languages, also within our program; in fact the first program that brought native speakers to the university to become trained professional linguists, so that they could do work on their own languages, in far greater depth than had ever been done before. That has continued. Since that time, particularly since the 1980s, it constitutes the vast bulk of work on the widest typological variety of languages.

Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied, and many changes in generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of languages analyzed. However, the claims made about linguistic universals have become stronger rather than weaker over time; for example, Richard Kayne's suggestion in the 1990s that all languages have an underlying Subject-Verb-Object word order would have seemed implausible in the 1960s. One of the prime motivations behind an alternative approach, the functional-typological approach or linguistic typology (often associated with Joseph Greenberg), is to base hypotheses of linguistic universals on the study of as wide a variety of the world's languages as possible, to classify the variation seen, and to form theories based on the results of this classification. The Chomskyan approach is too in-depth and reliant on native speaker knowledge to follow this method, though it has over time been applied to a broad range of languages.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modelling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory)...

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English, written with Morris Halle. This work is considered outdated (though it has recently been reprinted), and Chomsky does not publish on phonology anymore.

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for psychology and its fundamental direction in the 20th century. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, is the ability to interpret language. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.

In 1959, Chomsky published a long-circulated critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative explanation of language in behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a broad view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach differed considerably from most traditional views of language in that focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach, which focused on the mental representations of words and assumed a word, once learned, would appear in all functions. Chomsky's attack in his 1959 review, however, while touching some on different verbal functions, focused largely on attacking the conceptual basis of Skinner's approach, namely behavioral psychology. The essence of Chomsky's arguments in this paper is that the application of behavioral principles from animal research is meaningless when applied to human beings outside the laboratory, and that to understand complex behavior, one must first assume there are unobservable entities in the brain which are ultimately responsible; both of these assumptions run counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism. It should be noted that Chomsky's 1959 review has been severely criticized, the most famous (but far from only) criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83-99). This and similar reviews have noted important facts not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as that Chomsky did not understand either behavioral psychology in general or how Skinner's radical behaviorism differed from other varieties, often making embarrassing errors. Because of these serious problems, the paper failed to actually demonstrate what it has often being cited as doing. As such, those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it.

It has been alleged that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution," the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive," or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. The former view had denied even this, arguing that there were only logical relationships like "If you ask me if I want X, I will say yes." By contrast, Chomsky argued that the common way of understanding the mind, as having things like beliefs and even unconscious mental states, had to be right. Second, he argued that large parts of what the adult mind can do are "innate." While no child is born automatically able to speak a language, all are born with a powerful language-learning ability which allows them to soak up several languages very quickly in their early years. Subsequent psychologists have extended this thesis far beyond language; it is often suggested that it was once believed that the infant was a "blank slate" at birth in contrast to this view; however, even among behaviorists, this was never the case.

Finally, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Opinion on criticism of science culture

Chomsky strongly disagrees with poststructuralist and postmodern criticisms of science:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Chomsky notes that critiques of "white male science" are much like the anti-Semitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik movement:

In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics." Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be quite the proper word for their reaction. [3]

Chomsky's influence in other fields

Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms [4], and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. A number of arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System."

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who according to some researchers learned 125 signs in ASL, was named after Noam Chomsky.

Political views

Main article: Politics of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed a wide range of opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Some highlights are:

• Finds "terrorism" to be an easy label for governments which fail to acknowledge their own terrorist activities
• Holds a wide range of well-informed, sometimes unpopular criticisms of the U.S. government
• Holds libertarian socialist worldview, although he provides broad criticisms for its existing implementations
• Holds views that can be summarized as anti-war: Anti-Vietnam War and against most other US conflicts of his lifetime
• Advocates of broad free-speech rights, especially in the mass media
• Holds a notion of Zionism, but has broad criticism of Israel's policy towards Palestine

Chomsky has a broad range of criticisms of other aspects of the US government, society and the mass media. He has had many intellectual engagements with his peers in academia. In both his academic and political writings and speech, he has enjoyed a wide audience throughout much of the world.

Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Main article: Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Due to the controversial nature of his writings and beliefs, Chomsky has acquired many critics. Among his most controversial stances was that in the Faurisson affair.

Academic Achievements, Awards and Honors

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth most cited source overall.

In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, among many others.

Noam Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from the most prestigious universities around the world. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language." [5]

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. He reacted coolly, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to [polls]." [6]

Bibliography

Linguistics

See a full bibliography on Chomsky's MIT homepage [7].

• Chomsky (1955). Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.
• Chomsky, Noam, Morris Halle, and Fred Lukoff (1956). "On accent and juncture in English." In For Roman Jakobson. The Hague: Mouton
• Chomsky (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Reprint. Berlin and New York (1985).
• Chomsky (1964). Current Issues in Linguistic Theory.
• Chomsky (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
• Chomsky (1965). Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and Row. Reprint. Cartesian Linguistics. A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986.
• Chomsky (1966). Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar.
• Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
• Chomsky (1968). Language and Mind.
• Chomsky (1972). Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar.
• Chomsky (1975). The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.
• Chomsky (1975). Reflections on Language.
• Chomsky (1977). Essays on Form and Interpretation.
• Chomsky (1979). Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew.
• Chomsky (1980). Rules and Representations.
• Chomsky (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Holland: Foris Publications. Reprint. 7th Edition. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.
• Chomsky (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding.
• Chomsky (1982). Language and the Study of Mind.
• Chomsky (1982). Noam Chomsky on The Generative Enterprise, A discussion with Riny Hyybregts and Henk van Riemsdijk.
• Chomsky (1984). Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind.
• Chomsky (1986). Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.
• Chomsky (1986). Barriers. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Thirteen. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
• Chomsky (1993). Language and Thought.
• Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Chomsky (1998). On Language.
• Chomsky (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.
• Chomsky (2000). The Architecture of Language (Mukherji, et al, eds.).
• Chomsky (2001). On Nature and Language (Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi, ed.).

Filmography

• Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
• Distorted Morality — America's War On Terror?, Director: John Junkermann, Japan 2003
• Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV), Director: Will Pascoe, 2003
• The Corporation (2003)

See also

• Language acquisition
• Chomskybot
• Chomsky hierarchy
• Important publications in computability
• "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
• Intellectual worker
• Nim Chimpsky
• Chomsky torrents
• George Lakoff

External links

• Official website
• Latest ZNet forum replies (you might need to log in as a guest first.)
• Official weblog (subset of forum replies)
• MIT homepage
• {{{2|{{{name|Noam Chomsky}}}}}} at the Internet Movie Database
• Noam Chomsky at the Notable Names Database

• ZNet: Noam Chomsky Archive
• A-Infos Radio Project: Talks by Noam Chomsky (MP3)
• Chomsky Torrents — video and audio (BitTorrent)
• Cartoons spoofing Chomsky

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