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Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He created the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages important in the theory of computation. He is also well-known for his radical political activism: socialism and anarchism. He is one of the most often cited authors in the humanities.

In 1957 he wrote the book Syntactic Structures where he introduces transformational grammars. It was an elaboration of his doctoral thesis he wrote 1955. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and innate. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language generating/analysing system (a universal grammar) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.

The ideas of a built-in language mechanism have been taken up by Steven Pinker, who explained them in his book The Language Instinct.

Chomsky studied types of formal grammars as a way to represent a grammar system. He came up with a number of types he orders according to increasing complexity. This is now called the Chomsky hierarchy and is now used extensily in computer science. The grammar of regular languages for example encompasses all the rules needed for doing morphology.

A seminal work of him for phonology in the 20th century was The sound pattern of English. He published it together with Morris Halle.

One of his better-known political texts is Manufacturing Consent -- The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he co-authored with Edward S. Herman and which was intended to show how financial interests in the United States' media influence the news.

He was an outspoken critic of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and is in general critical of all American covert and overt operations in foreign countries. His political position is normally classified as "social anarchism": he is suspicious of and fights against concentrated power both in government and corporations.

It is worth noting that almost everything about Noam Chomsky's ideas are controversial, both in linguistics and politics. He has a great many detractors both in academia and the general public for his political writings; those same writings have earned him a great number of supporters among radicals and anarchists.

External links and further reading

Noam Chomsky's own MIT homepage: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/chomsky.home.html

Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures, The Hague, Mouton, 1965.

Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle: The Sound Pattern of English, Harper & Row, New York 1968

Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct, W. Morrow & Co., New York 1994

The Chomskybot - a demonstration of a peculiarly primitive variety of computational linguistics: http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

Noam Chomsky: What Uncle Sam really wants, Odonian Press, Berkeley 1992.

Noam Chomsky: The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Odonian Press, Berkeley 1993

Chomsky and socialism: http://mediafilter.org/caq/CAQ54chmky.html

Chomsky and anarchism: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html

More on Chomsky and anarchism: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/9612-anarchism.html

The Noam Chomsky Archive: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/

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	In 1957 he wrote the book <i>Syntactic Structures</i> where he introduces [[transformational grammars]]. It was an elaboration of his doctoral thesis he wrote 1955. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (<i>surface structure</i> versus <i>deep structure</i>). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and innate. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language <nowiki>generating/analysing</nowiki> system (a [[universal grammar]]) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.		In 1957 he wrote the book <i>Syntactic Structures</i> where he introduces [[transformational grammars]]. It was an elaboration of his doctoral thesis he wrote 1955. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (<i>surface structure</i> versus <i>deep structure</i>). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and [[innate]]. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language <nowiki>generating/analysing</nowiki> system (a [[universal grammar]]) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.