Chomsky, (Avram) Noam

born Dec. 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.

U.S. linguist and political activist.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955. Through a long series of books and articles beginning with Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky has maintained as his goal the articulation of a theory of universal grammar, that is, a framework of principles that would account for all language-specific rules. His work has had two decisive effects. One was to focus new emphasis on syntax, previously a relatively unexplored area of language. The other was to make theories of language and linguistic competence independent of any particular language corpus, so that linguists tended to develop models of syntax or phonology and test them against real-language "facts," rather than draw theoretical generalizations from a collection of data. Chomsky also has a long history of protest against U.S. foreign policy. His political views have been expounded in many books and articles, including Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in a Democratic Society (1989) and World Orders, Old and New (1994).

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