Noam Chomsky

Famed scholar Noam Chomsky is known for both his groundbreaking contributions to linguistics and his penetrating critiques of political systems.

noam chomsky

Who Is Noam Chomsky?

Noam Chomsky was an intellectual prodigy who went on to earn a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT and has produced groundbreaking, controversial theories on human linguistic capacity. Chomsky is widely published, both on topics in his field and on issues of dissent and U.S. foreign policy.

Early Life and Education

Chomsky was a brilliant child, and his curiosities and intellect were kindled greatly by his early experiences. Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. He was raised with a younger brother, David, and although his own family was middle class, he witnessed injustices all around him. One of his earliest memories consisted of watching security officers beat women strikers outside of a textile plant.

His mother, Elsie, had been active in the radical politics of the 1930s. His father, William, a Russian Jewish immigrant like his mother, was a respected professor of Hebrew at Gratz College, an institution for teacher’s training. At the age of 10, while attending a progressive school that emphasized student self-actualization, Chomsky wrote an editorial on the rise of fascism in Europe after the Spanish Civil War for his school newspaper. Rather amazingly, his story was substantially researched enough to be the basis for a later essay he would present at New York University.

By the age of 13, Chomsky was traveling from Philadelphia to New York, spending much of his time listening to the disparate perspectives hashed out among adults over cigarettes and magazines at his uncle’s newsstand at the back of a 72nd Street subway exit. Chomsky greatly admired his uncle, a man of little formal education, but someone who was wildly smart about the world around him. Chomsky’s current political views spring from this type of lived-experience stance, positing that all people can understand politics and economics and make their own decisions, and that authority ought to be tested before being deemed legitimate and worthy of power.

The Scholar

Just as World War II was coming to a close, Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He found little use for his classes until he met Zellig S. Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics (breaking language down into distinct parts or levels). Chomsky was moved by what he felt language could reveal about society. Harris was moved by Chomsky’s great potential and did much to advance the young man’s undergraduate studies, with Chomsky receiving his B.A. and M.A in nontraditional modes of study.

Harris introduced Chomsky to Harvard mathematician Nathan Fine and philosophers Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine. Although an industrious student of Goodman's, Chomsky drastically disagreed with his approach. Goodman believed the human mind was a blank slate, whereas Chomsky believed the basic concepts of language were innate in every human’s mind and then only influenced by one’s syntactical environment. His 1951 master’s thesis was titled "The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew."

In 1949, Chomsky married educational specialist Carol Schatz, a woman he had known since childhood. The relationship lasted for 59 years until she died from cancer in 2008. They had three children together. For a short time, between Chomsky’s master's and doctoral studies, the couple lived on a kibbutz in Israel. When they returned, Chomsky continued at the University of Pennsylvania and executed some of his research and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several ideas that he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on linguistics, Syntactic Structures (1957).

Linguistic Revolutions

In 1955, the professorial staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invited Chomsky to join their ranks. Now a professor emeritus, he worked in the school's Department of Linguistics & Philosophy for half a century before retiring from active teaching in 2005. He has also been a visiting professor or lectured at a range of other universities, including Columbia, UCLA, Princeton and Cambridge, and holds honorary degrees from countless others throughout the world.

During his career as a professor, Chomsky introduced transformational grammar to the linguistics field. His theory asserts that languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why children are able to learn different languages more easily than adults. One of his most famous contributions to linguistics is what his contemporaries have called the Chomsky Hierarchy, a division of grammar into groups, moving up or down in their expressive abilities. These ideas have had huge ramifications in fields such as modern psychology and philosophy, both answering and raising questions about human nature and how we process information.

Chomsky’s writings on linguistics include Current Issues in Linguistic Theor y (1964), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986).

Politics and Controversies

But Chomsky’s ideas have never been relegated to language alone. Weaving between the world of academia and popular culture, Chomsky has also gained a reputation for his often radical political views, which he describes as "libertarian socialist," some of which have been seen as controversial and highly open to debate.

In 1967, The New York Review of Books published his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." In light of the Vietnam War, which Chomsky adamantly opposed, he addressed what he saw as a disgracefully resigned intellectual community, of which he was an embarrassed member, with the hope of igniting his peers into deeper thought and action.

In 1979, Chomsky signed a petition in support of the free-speech rights of Robert Faurisson, a French lecturer who denied the existence of the gas chambers used in Nazi concentration camps. As a result, Chomsky found himself in the middle of a heated controversy, and in response, he asserted that his views are "diametrically opposed" to Faurisson's conclusions and his intent was to support Faurisson's civil liberties not his Holocaust denial. The incident haunted Chomsky for decades, however, and his reputation in France, in particular, was damaged for some time afterward.

Chomsky also sparked controversy with 9-11: Was There an Alternative? , his 2002 collection of essays which analyzes the September 11 attacks on the United States, the impact of U.S. foreign policy and media control. In the book, Chomsky denounces the “horrifying atrocities” of the attacks, but is critical of the United States’ use of power, calling it “a leading terrorist state.” The book became a best seller, denounced by conservative critics as a distortion of American history while praised by supporters as offering an honest analysis of events leading to 9-11 that weren't being reported by the mainstream media.

Among his many books addressing politics are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), Rogue States (2000), Hegemony or Survival (2003), Gaza in Crisis (with Ilan Pappé, 2010), and most recently, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (2013).

Current Affairs

Despite his often controversial viewpoints, Chomsky remains a highly respected and sought-after thinker who continues to author new books and contributes to a wide variety of journals and remains active on the lecture circuit. Over the course of his career, Chomsky has also amassed a wealth of academic and humanitarian awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences and the humanitarian Sydney Peace Prize.

In 2014, at age 85, Chomsky remarried, to Valeria Wasserman.

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  • The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.
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  • Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the south, during the civil rights movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights. Just asking for the congressional amendments during the Civil War, asking them to be implemented.

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Noam chomsky.

  • Howard Lasnik Howard Lasnik University of Maryland
  •  and  Terje Lohndal Terje Lohndal Norwegian University of Science and Technology and UiT The Arctic University of Norway
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.356
  • Published online: 22 August 2017

Noam Avram Chomsky is one of the central figures of modern linguistics. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. In 1945, Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Zellig Harris (1909–1992), a leading Structuralist, through their shared political interests. His first encounter with Harris’s work was when he proof-read Harris’s book Methods in Structural Linguistics , published in 1951 but completed already in 1947. Chomsky grew dissatisfied with Structuralism and started to develop his own major idea that syntax and phonology are in part matters of abstract representations. This was soon combined with a psychobiological view of language as a unique part of the mind/brain.

Chomsky spent 1951–1955 as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he joined the faculty at MIT under the sponsorship of Morris Halle. He was promoted to full professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in 1961, appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976, retiring in 2002. Chomsky is still remarkably active, publishing, teaching, and lecturing across the world.

In 1967, both the University of Chicago and the University of London awarded him honorary degrees, and since then he has been the recipient of scores of honors and awards. In 1988, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in basic science, created in 1984 in order to recognize work in areas not included among the Nobel Prizes. These honors are all a testimony to Chomsky’s influence and impact in linguistics and cognitive science more generally over the past 60 years. His contributions have of course also been heavily criticized, but nevertheless remain crucial to investigations of language.

Chomsky’s work has always centered around the same basic questions and assumptions, especially that human language is an inherent property of the human mind. The technical part of his research has continuously been revised and updated. In the 1960s phrase structure grammars were developed into what is known as the Standard Theory, which transformed into the Extended Standard Theory and X-bar theory in the 1970s. A major transition occurred at the end of the 1970s, when the Principles and Parameters Theory emerged. This theory provides a new understanding of the human language faculty, focusing on the invariant principles common to all human languages and the points of variation known as parameters. Its recent variant, the Minimalist Program, pushes the approach even further in asking why grammars are structured the way they are.

  • philosophy of language
  • phrase structure

1. Introduction

This article will present an overview of some of Noam Chomsky’s most important contributions to linguistics. The presentation will mostly focus on a set of themes suitable for organizing Chomsky’s ideas and scholarly impact. We will also provide a bit of history and briefly touch on ways in which his ideas have developed across time.

Chomsky’s intellectual contributions and history are just as much the intellectual history of the field of generative grammar. Obviously, many scholars have contributed to this field, making it a collective enterprise and not a single man’s work. Nevertheless, Chomsky has had a unique impact, as his ideas and work have shaped the development far more than any other single individual. For that reason, and given that the topic of this article is Noam Chomsky, our focus will be on him in what follows, although the reader should bear in mind that many ideas have been initiated, developed, or modified by a large cohort of scholars.

The focus in this essay will be on Chomsky’s contributions to the study of syntax. Early on he also did work on the sound systems of human language, most notably a ground-breaking book coauthored with Morris Halle (Chomsky & Halle, 1968 ). And Chomsky’s MA thesis was on the morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (Chomsky, 1951 ).

One caveat is in order: We will not explore Chomsky’s political views or any connection that there may or may not be between his linguistics and politics. For extensive discussion of this, see Smith and Allott ( 2015 ).

This article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides some biographical information about Chomsky. In Section 3, we focus on Chomsky’s earliest work, namely his work on formal/mathematical models of natural language. Foundational issues regarding Chomsky’s approach to language are presented in Section 4.

2. Biographical Sketch

Noam Avram Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928 . In 1945 , Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Zellig Harris ( 1909–1992 ), a leading Structuralist, through their shared political interests. His first encounter with Harris’ work was when he proofread Harris’s book Methods in Structural Linguistics , published in 1951 but completed already in 1947 . Chomsky grew dissatisfied with Structuralism and started to develop his own major idea that syntax and phonology are in part matters of abstract representations. This was soon combined with a psychobiological view of language as a unique part of the mind/brain.

Chomsky spent 1951–1955 as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he joined the faculty at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) sponsored by Morris Halle. Since then, MIT has been his intellectual home. He was promoted to full professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in 1961 , appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics in 1966 , and Institute Professor in 1976 . Although he has officially retired and become an Institute Professor Emeritus, Chomsky is still remarkably active, publishing, teaching, and lecturing across the world.

In 1967 , both the University of Chicago and the University of London awarded him honorary degrees, and since then he has been the recipient countless honors and awards. In 1988 , he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in basic science, created in 1984 in order to recognize work in areas not included among the Nobel Prizes. These honors are all a testimony to Chomsky’s influence and impact in linguistics, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science more generally over the past 70 years.

See Chomsky’s public lecture on analytic philosophy in Oslo, Norway, in 2011 .

3. The Early Years: Formal Grammars

As mentioned, Chomsky was Zellig Harris’s student and thus he knew the details of structural linguistics. His own first works were also attempts to extend Harris ( 1951 ), e.g., in Chomsky ( 1951 ). Harris introduced the concept of a transformation, but for Harris, transformations were relations between sentences. An active sentence would be transformed into a passive, just to give one example. Chomsky soon discovered that there are data that such a method cannot capture. Chomsky ( 1957 , 1963 ) demonstrates this and presents an alternative: sentences have an abstract hierarchical structure that is generated via phrase structure grammars and transformations are relations between abstract structures. This alternative is the main topic of Chomsky’s two most famous and groundbreaking works: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT) (Chomsky, 1955 ) and Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957 ). LSLT was completed in 1955 , while Chomsky was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. The 1975 version contains a comprehensive introduction that also explains how the manuscript developed. Both LSLT and Syntactic Structures contain very little explicit discussion of what Chomsky later became famous for and which we will discuss below, namely an innate language faculty. Rather, they are concerned with developing a formal framework for describing the syntactic structure of human languages. Chomsky ( 1956 , 1963 ) describes various classes of formal grammars and organizes them into a hierarchy, today known as the Chomsky hierarchy or sometimes the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy (Chomsky & Schützenberger, 1963 ). Research since, including Chomsky ( 1955 , 1957 ), has mostly been devoted to developing the class which is suitable for human languages. In his work, Chomsky demonstrated how context-free phrase-structure (PS) grammars can be applied to language. PS grammars consist of:

A procedure for how a sentence is generated, a derivation, then consists of a series of lines. The first line has to start with a designated initial symbol, followed by lines that can be rewritten according to F. The procedure/derivation stops when there are no more symbols that can be rewritten. An illustration is given in (2).

These rules give us the derivation in (3) among several other “equivalent” derivations.

Constituent structure is captured in PS grammars by introducing nonterminal, i.e., unpronounced symbols, which is a novelty in Chomsky’s work. Later, in Chomsky ( 1965 ), rules such as the last two in (2) were called lexical insertion rules as they inserted lexical material into the resulting phrase marker.

Chomsky presented a range of evidence in favor of a sentence having more than just a superficial structure closely resembling the way in which it is pronounced, but that there also is an abstract representation which can potentially be very different from the superficial one. In addition, there can be intermediate structures between the two. Throughout Chomsky’s work, this aspect concerning levels of representation is fundamental.

4. Foundational Work and Ideas

Whereas Chomsky’s earliest work was concerned with the formal nature of grammars, he soon turned towards more general issues. Chomsky ( 1959 ), a review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner, focuses on issues regarding language use and the creative ability all humans have when it comes to language. The review attracted significant attention, not least because it pointed out fundamental problems with behaviorism. Chomsky argues that language acquisition happens so quickly that there is simply no way a stimulus–response mechanism can account for the knowledge that a young child has. Furthermore, such a mechanism does not do justice to the linguistic creativity that children display, namely that we can use our language ability to create new words and sentences that we have not heard before. Rather, what is needed is a nativist perspective on language, whereby humans have a biological blueprint for developing language. The task for the linguist is then to investigate this ability from a linguistic point of view.

Questions concerning language acquisition and the nature of humans’ linguistic competence quickly became Chomsky’s main interest. 1965 and 1966 saw the appearance of two very important publications in Chomsky’s scholarship. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (henceforth, Aspects ) was published in 1965 , and in 1966 he published Cartesian Linguistics (recently reissued as Chomsky, 2009 ). Whereas Aspects mainly presents an overall framework within which to think about language, Cartesian Linguistics is arguably the best nontechnical presentation of Chomsky’s overall philosophy of language. In this latter book, Chomsky traces aspects of the history of his approach to language, drawing connections to Descartes and the Port-Royal tradition. He puts forward a strong defense of a nativist approach to language, that is, arguing that humans are born with a special ability to acquire language. This accounts for the great speed with which humans come to possess language, it accounts for their linguistic creativity (making “infinite use of finite means,” to use a much-cited phrase from Wilhelm von Humboldt which Chomsky often has emphasized), and it accounts for certain aspects of the structure of human languages that children immediately latch onto. Chomsky also makes the point that whereas we can seek to understand the system underlying human language, we probably will never be able to fully understand why we come to say the things we do, as the latter relates to issues of free will that we still do not understand. Bracken ( 1984 ) and McGilvray’s introduction to Chomsky ( 2009 ) provide discussions of the significance of Cartesian Linguistics , whereas Salmon ( 1969 ) offers an important critical discussion.

Returning to Aspects , chapter 1 in this book introduces a number of important concepts in Chomsky’s approach to language. The general goal of the chapter is to define a distinct, scientific project for linguistics. It is “scientific” because its goal is to explain what underlies the linguistic abilities of an individual, and it is “distinct” because human language appears to have special properties. In developing this project, a number of notions are proposed. Let us review them briefly.

One distinction is the one between competence and performance. Chomsky argues that linguists need to study competence, i.e., the grammatical tacit knowledge that any native speaker has of his/her language(s). Competence can only be studied through its outputs, i.e., performance, which can be any expression, be it spoken, written, signed, or nonnatural experimental data. The latter is used to probe more subtly and precisely for specific aspects of competence while controlling for as many outside factors as possible. One such method is to ask a native speaker to judge sentences via what is now called acceptability judgments. Much later, in Chomsky ( 1986a ), the distinction is refined and now Chomsky distinguishes between E-language and I-language, E for external and I for internal, individual, and intensional. I-language is the object of study in linguistics according to Chomsky, whereas E-language is the sum of totally externally manifested I-language, i.e., all performances of linguistic knowledge regardless of the individual speaker who has produced it. The intensional part of I-language highlights the fact that the goal is to investigate the nature of the computational mental system making it possible for humans to speak, sign, and understand an unlimited number of new sentences.

An important methodological issue was also introduced in Aspects : the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality (and correspondingly unacceptability and ungrammaticality). Acceptability involves a judgment made by a native speaker concerning how natural a given set of sentences seem. Typically, a speaker will be presented with two contrasting sentences and the job is to rate them. For example, a native speaker of English will, when comparing Norbert likes cookies and Norbert cookies likes , say that the former is acceptable whereas the latter is unacceptable. Grammaticality, on the other hand, involves a claim made by the linguist as to whether or not the grammar allows a given structure or not. In the present example, the linguist will conclude that the structure underlying Norbert likes cookies is grammatical in English, whereas the structure underlying Norbert cookies likes is ungrammatical in English. Linguists often speak of “grammaticality judgments”, although strictly speaking, this is wrong per Chomsky ( 1965 ).

Adequacy is a crucial notion in Aspects . Chomsky separates it into descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy . A grammar that is descriptively adequate is one that correctly describes the set of grammatical sentences and correctly rules out the ungrammatical sentences. As such, descriptive adequacy is a basic requirement for any grammatical analysis. Even scholars who do not adopt the generative approach, but who, for instance, seek to analyze linguistic production as witnessed in corpora, need to account for the fact that certain patterns do not occur and that the grammar of English is different from that of Japanese. Chomsky, however, puts the bar higher by emphasizing that the goal of linguistic theory should be to achieve explanatory adequacy. This is defined as follows:

To the extent that a linguistic theory succeeds in selecting a descriptively adequate grammar on the basis of primary linguistic data, we can say that it meets the condition of explanatory adequacy. That is, to this extent, it offers an explanation for the intuition of the native speaker on the basis of an empirical hypothesis concerning the innate predisposition of the child to develop a certain kind of theory to deal with the evidence presented to him. (Chomsky, 1965 , pp. 25–26)

This means that the analysis also should account for how a child could acquire the given grammatical system within the short time span that he or she does.

Aspects also introduces a revised formalism for the description of natural language, to which we turn next.

5. Grammatical Architecture, 1965–1980

In Chomsky ( 1955 , 1957 ), PS grammars only construct monoclausal structures. These structures can be merged into e.g., embedded clauses by way of a mechanism called generalized transformations. The recursive component is thus to be found in transformations. In Chomsky ( 1965 ), this is changed and recursion is incorporated into “the base.” A rule such as (4) was added to analyze sentences such as (5).

With a rule such as (4), the PS component now has a recursive character, and, in this model, generalized transformations are eliminated.

Another related innovation in Chomsky ( 1965 ) is the notion of Deep Structure (later called D-structure). D-structure and recursion in the base serve two purposes in the theory: (i) They make the overall theory simpler, and (ii) in connection with a principle of cyclic application of transformations, they rule out certain derivations that do not appear to occur. The earlier 1955 model had no constraints on the interaction between the generalized transformations that combine separate phrase markers and the singulary transformations that manipulate both simple phrase markers and the complex ones that result from generalized transformations. Thus, there could be operations on embedded sentences after they have been embedded. But no such derivations seem to be needed for the description of human languages. In Chomsky ( 1965 ), such derivations are excluded by the elimination of generalized transformations and the imposition of cyclicity on (singulary) transformational derivations.

Importantly, D-structure also played a role in Chomsky’s approach to how syntax relates to semantics. He develops the following model:

The syntactic component consists of a base that generates deep structures and a transformational part that maps them into surface structures. The deep structure of a sentence is submitted to the semantic component for semantic interpretation, and its surface structure enters the phonological component and undergoes phonetic interpretation. The final effect of a grammar, then, is to relate a semantic interpretation to a phonetic representation—that is, to state how a sentence is interpreted. (Chomsky, 1965 , pp. 135–136)

Chomsky follows Katz and Postal ( 1964 ) in severely restricting the phrase structural information available for interpretation. Their slogan was that “transformations do not change meaning.” The model can be depicted as in (6), where Surface Structure is typically abbreviated as S-structure.

The framework was soon challenged by what became known as Generative Semantics. This approach built on Katz and Postal ( 1964 ) in arguing that meaning is represented by a more abstract representation than Chomsky’s D-structure (Lakoff, 1971 ) and that very powerful transformations worked to derive surface representations.

Even within the Chomskyan approach, there were questions concerning D-structure being the sole locus of semantic interpretation. Already Chomsky ( 1957 ) observed that sentences containing quantifiers are interpreted partly based on the surface position of the quantifiers. Consider the examples in (7).

(7a) may be true at the same time as (7b) is false, for example in a case where one person in the room knows Japanese and Chinese, and another one Norwegian and Spanish. Chomsky ( 1965 ) acknowledges that (7) is problematic in a framework where D-structure is the input to semantic interpretation. He speculates that the difference may be due to discourse effects. However, it was soon shown that the problem is far more general, leading to a revised framework whereby both D-structure and S-structure contribute to semantic interpretation (Jackendoff, 1969 ; Chomsky, 1970b ). This framework is known as the Extended Standard Theory (see also Chomsky, 1970a ). Here D-structure only contributed information about grammatical relations, such as subject and object, whereas more or less all other aspects of meaning (scope, anaphora, focus, presupposition, etc.) are derived from S-structures.

Another innovation in the Extended Standard Theory concerns a new encoding of transformations. For movement transformations leaving a gap, it was now suggested that this gap actually consists of a trace (Wasow, 1972 ; Chomsky, 1973 ). For all intents and purposes, this trace acts like a placeholder for the lexical content. Given traces, the motivation for D-structure as a level of representation is reduced, but it took some more time until it was eventually dissolved (Chomsky, 1995 ). Instead of the labels semantic and phonetic interpretation in (6), the former was labeled LF for “Logical Form” and the latter labeled PF for “Phonetic Form”. Crucially, both are grammatical levels of representation and not the actual semantic logical forms or the phonetic encoding.

This grammatical architecture became the cornerstone of what is known as Government and Binding, to which we turn next.

6. Principles and Parameters Theory, 1980–Today

Chomsky and Lasnik ( 1977 ) were concerned with restricting the grammar so that it would rule out options that should not be available. A major problem with earlier models was that they let in far too many structures and rules that did not occur. Constraining the grammar is important in order to get closer to the goal of Aspects , namely to provide explanations rather than just descriptions. Only that way it is possible to account for language acquisition and how grammatical competence develops and reaches its target state. Following some ideas in Chomsky and Halle ( 1968 ), Chomsky and Lasnik argued that something along the lines of a theory of markedness should also apply to syntax, not just phonology. Concretely, they suggested a theory of core grammar with highly restricted options with a few choice points (parameters). Filters were the mechanism that accounted for constraints, and most of them applied to surface structures. However, some filters will have to be language-specific or even dialect-specific, such as blocking for to constructions in most dialects of English.

(10) illustrates the surface filter in question.

Chomsky ( 1981 ) improves on this framework by replacing language/dialect-specific and construction-specific rules with rules that are highly general and constrained by universal principles. This is the Principles and Parameters model. It represents “a radical break from the rich tradition of thousands of years of linguistic inquiry” (Lasnik & Otero, 2004 , p. 207). This model proposes a solution to the fundamental problem of language acquisition by proposing that the language faculty consists of universal principles, and parameters that encode grammatical variation. The child, then, has to set the parameters for the language in question, which in the early days was argued to be a set of binary options—much like a “switchboard,” to use James Higginbotham’s metaphor. The assumption was that parameters linked several properties together where at least one property had to be easily observable. This way, by observing something easy (say, whether or not a language has null subjects like Spanish or Italian), you can set some other property that is harder to observe (say, whether or not the language obeys the that -trace filter, cf. Perlmutter, 1968 ; Chomsky & Lasnik, 1977 ; Rizzi, 1982 ). The principles were assumed to be universal and much work has gone into investigating the nature and format of these principles.

Principles and Parameters Theory consists of two different models (Freidin, 2007 ; Lasnik & Lohndal, 2010 , 2013 ). The first is Government and Binding (GB; Chomsky, 1981 , 1986b ; Chomsky & Lasnik, 1993 ) and the second is the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky, 1995 , 2000a , 2005 , 2007 ). We will briefly describe both of them.

A fundamental aspect of GB, in addition to the incorporation of principles and parameters, is its modular architecture: Modules governing various parts of the grammar were postulated, and phenomena such as the passive were analyzed by recourse to interacting modules that work together to derive the properties of the passive. The modules were binding (largely concerned with anaphora), case, theta (argument structure), control (the construal of the missing embedded subject in, e.g., Mary tried __ to win ), and bounding (locality of movement), with the relation of “government” applying across these modules (see Lasnik & Lohndal, 2010 , for an accessible presentation). Notably, this approach denied the theoretical relevance of constructions; rather, constructions are epiphenomenal, as they follow from more basic and abstract properties of grammar.

The basic architecture of GB is as depicted in (8) at the end of the previous section. During the late 1980s, questions started emerging concerning the levels in this model as D- and S-structure became less and less prominent in the theory. This suggests that just two levels are actually required levels of representation. What is required in order for language to relate sound to meaning is an interface with the articulatory-perceptual system (PF) and the conceptual-intentional system (LF). Conceptually, PF and LF enjoy a more privileged status than D- and S-structure in the theory. As such, there really has to be overwhelming empirical evidence justifying the latter two levels, which research concluded was no longer the case. Chomsky then returned to his original proposal from the 1950’s, with no D-structure and structure-building also being done by generalized transformations. A derivation starts out with a numeration, which is a selection of items from the lexicon. These lexical items are then inserted as the derivation proceeds, starting from the bottom, with argument structure and adding functional layers as need be. This, then, became the approach to grammar in the Minimalist Program, or just Minimalism, outlined in great detail in Chomsky ( 1995 ).

The Minimalist Program pursues the hypothesis that language meets the requirements imposed by the external systems in a “perfect” way. The goal is to provide explanations for why the grammar has the structure and organization that it has, which Chomsky ( 2004 ) later dubbed going “beyond explanatory adequacy.” Essentially it is an extremely challenging why -question, seeking to provide a more fundamental understanding of the computational system for language. In the 2000s, this was contextualized in an important paper by Chomsky (Chomsky, 2005 ) where he says that there are three factors involved in understanding language: (i) the genetic component, (ii) experience from input, and (iii) principles not specific to the language system. The latter has become known as “third-factors,” and much research is going into understanding the properties of these third-factors (see Lohndal & Uriagereka, 2016 ). This research again connects to some of Chomsky’s earliest work, namely Aspects , where he says that many properties of the language faculty may follow from “principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law” (Chomsky, 1965 , p. 59).

It should be noted that with Minimalism, the concept of parameter has changed quite significantly. Chomsky ( 1995 ) endorsed what Baker ( 2008 ) has labeled the Borer–Chomsky conjecture (due to Borer, 1984 ), whereby parameters are reduced to features on lexical and functional elements. Acquiring variation is thereby a question of acquiring any element of the lexicon. This shift has also been triggered by the empirical inadequacy of the view of parameters developed in GB (see Newmeyer, 2005 , and Biberauer, 2008 , for much discussion). Recently, a different view of parameters has emerged, one in which there are hierarchies of different types of parameters (see Biberauer & Roberts, 2012 , 2016 ).

Chomsky is still contributing to the theoretical development of Minimalism. His recent ideas revolve around the importance of labeling of phrases—as NP, VP, etc.—and its place in the architecture of the language faculty (Chomsky, 2013 , 2015 ). Remarkably, even after more than 70 years, he is still setting the agenda in terms of defining important research questions and problems.

7. Controversies and Debates

It goes without saying that Chomsky’s work has provoked abundant reaction and criticism. Scholars have taken issue with more or less every claim that he has made, sometimes arguing against them completely, at other times suggesting modifications and improvements. Regardless of one’s position, it is striking that one scholar’s ideas have been and continue to be discussed both in terms of their technical details and in terms of the more general philosophy. Here we want to briefly single out some of the main controversies surrounding Chomsky’s work (see also Harris, 1993 ; Huck & Goldsmith, 1995 ; Newmeyer, 1996 ; Seuren, 1998 ). We will focus on (i) innateness, (ii) the status of movement in syntactic theories, and (iii) Chomsky’s view of meaning.

Perhaps the most contested part of Chomsky’s approach to human language is his arguments that parts of the language faculty are innate. Numerous linguists, psychologists, and philosophers have argued against this idea, and Chomsky has participated in famous debates with Foucault, Quine, and Piaget. Many of these scholars agree that there is some innate contribution to the feat of language acquisition, but they disagree that there is any contribution that is specific to the language faculty. Unfortunately, much of the criticism in the literature misses the mark, as it ignores the kind of empirical arguments Chomsky adduces in support of the conclusion that there is innate structure. It is important to note that nativism for Chomsky is not an a priori claim, it is a claim based on empirical evidence and arguments, which we cannot review here but which are amply represented in the work of Chomsky and colleagues. Langacker ( 1987 ), Cowie ( 1999 ), Tomasello ( 2003 ), and Sampson ( 2005 ) are all influential critiques of various aspects of Chomsky’s approach. More balanced, yet still critical, collections are Harman ( 1974 ), Piattelli-Palmarini ( 1980 ), and Otero ( 1994 ).

With Minimalism, there has also been an important yet fairly unrecognized change outside of Chomskyan circles. Chomsky ( 2007 , p. 4) characterizes pre-Minimalism approaches as follows: “Throughout the history of generative grammar, the problem of determining the character of FL [Faculty of Language] has been approached ‘from top down’: How much must be attributed to UG [Universal Grammar] to account for language acquisition?” Minimalism turns this upside-down as it “[. . .] seeks to approach the problem ‘from bottom up’: How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of I-languages attained, relying on third factor principles?” (Chomsky, 2007 , p. 4). Put differently, the goal is to see how little language-specific innateness is required while still being able to account for the structures and representations every healthy child acquires. This creates avenues for collaborative work with scholars who have, for example, studied the input to acquisition very carefully or scholars who argue that most of language acquisition can be derived by properties of general cognition.

Another area of debate concerns the analysis of long-distance dependencies in generative approaches to language. Chomskyan approaches have always argued that some long-distance dependencies are created by movement, that is, a gap is created by moving a filler to its surface position (or the movement can be covert, as has been argued, e.g., for Chinese wh -questions; see Huang, 1982 ). Movement operations in the syntax are quite distinct for Chomsky’s approach, as most of the other approaches argue that other formal devices can ensure better empirical coverage of the facts. For instance, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag, 1987 , 1994 ) assumes that movement phenomena are captured by way of a special feature (SLASH) that enables information to be accessible both lower in the structure and higher. Other approaches, such as Lexical Functional Grammar (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982 ; Sells, 2013 ), implement long-distance dependencies in yet another way. It would take us too far afield to discuss the rich set of arguments involved in distinguishing these alternatives. It seems fair to say that the different formal frameworks operate independently of each other and by and large constitute their own research programs (even though the many differences may be less deep than it appears, cf. Sells, 1985 , for such an argument).

The last issue that we will discuss here concerns the role of meaning in Chomsky’s approach to grammar. Chomsky has published extensively on more philosophical aspects of meaning (Chomsky, 2000b , 2006 ; see Smith & Allott, 2015 ), which is not what we will discuss here. Rather, we will take issue with the oft-made claim that Chomsky has neglected, or even avoided, semantics in his theories of grammar (see, e.g., Montague, 1974 ; Lakoff, 1987 ; Langacker, 1987 ; Tomasello, 2003 ). This assessment is somewhat curious given that Chomsky ( 1957 , p. 87) already wrote: “We can test the adequacy of a given set of abstract linguistic levels by asking whether or not grammars formulated in terms of these levels enable us to provide a satisfactory analysis of the notion of ‘understanding.’” Ever since, semantic facts have played a crucial role in syntactic argumentation. Consider the well-known contrast between (11) and (12) (Chomsky, 1963 , p. 66).

Each of these sentences only has one meaning. (11) has the meaning indicated in (13a) and not the meaning indicated in (13b), whereas the opposite holds for (12), as seen in (14).

Chomsky argued that a descriptively adequate grammar needs to assign different syntactic structures to (11) and (12) in order for their semantic interpretation to be different. This grammar also needs to ensure that (15) is ambiguous, with both types of meanings (Pietroski, 2015 ).

For Chomsky, semantics is interpretive, meaning that it is based on mechanisms that interpret the syntactic structure. A range of additional examples can be provided; see Hinzen ( 2006 ) and Pietroski ( 2015 ).

What Chomsky is skeptical of, is that it is possible to provide explanatory theories of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). This is partly because of his skepticism towards providing scientific theories of language production and communication in general. Both production and communication involve more mental faculties than just language, which is partly why Chomsky has very little to say about language use, as he is interested in understanding the structure underlying language use. Smith and Allott ( 2015 ) provide additional comprehensive discussion of these issues.

See the Chomsky-Foucault debate on human nature .

Further Reading

  • Anthony, L. M. , & Hornstein, N. (Eds.). (2003). Chomsky and his critics . Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Barsky, R. F. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Boeckx, C. (2006). Linguistic minimalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bricmont, J. , & Frank, J. (Eds.). (2010). Chomsky notebook . New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Cela-Conde, C. J. , & Marty, G. (1998). Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist Program and the philosophy of mind. Syntax , 1 , 19–36.
  • Chomsky, N. (2004a). The generative enterprise revisited: Discussions with Riny Huybregts, Henk van Riemsdijk, Naoki Fukui and Mihoko Zushi . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Chomsky, N. (2004b). Language and politics , 2d ed. Edited by C. P. Otero . Oakland, CA: AK.
  • Chomsky, N. (2012). The science of language: Interviews with James McGilvray . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Freidin, R. (2007). Generative grammar: Theory and its history . London: Routledge
  • Hinzen, W. (2006). Mind design and minimal syntax . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Jenkins, L. (2000). Biolinguistics: Exploring the biology of language . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lasnik, H. (2000). Syntactic structures revisited . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Lasnik, H. , & Lohndal, T. (2013). Brief overview of the history of generative syntax. In M. den Dikken (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax (pp. 26–60). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lohndal, T. , & Lasnik, H. (2013). Noam Chomsky . Oxford Bibliographies . doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0142
  • Lyons, J. (1970). Chomsky . London: Fontana-Collins.
  • McGilvray, J. (Eds.). (2005). The Cambridge companion to Chomsky . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • McGilvray, J. (2014). Chomsky: Language, mind, and politics . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
  • Otero, C. P. (Ed.). (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments . 4 vols. London: Routledge.
  • Smith, N. , & Allott, N. (2015). Chomsky: Ideas and ideals . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Baker, M. C. (2008). The macroparameter in a microparametric world. In M. T. Biberauer , (Ed.), The limits of syntactic variation (pp. 351–374). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Biberauer, M. T. (2008). Introduction. In M. T. Biberauer (Ed.), The limits of syntactic variation (pp. 1–74). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Biberauer, M. T. , & Roberts, I. (2012). Towards a parameter hierarchy for auxiliaries: Diachronic considerations. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics , 6 , 267–294.
  • Biberauer, M. T. , & Roberts, I. (2016). Parameter typology from a diachronic perspective. In E. Bidese , F. Cognola , & M. C. Moroni (Eds.), Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation (pp. 259–291). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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  • Bracken, H. M. (1984). Mind and language: Essays on Descartes and Chomsky . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
  • Chomsky, N. (1951). Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew . Master’s thesis. University of Pennsylvania.
  • Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory , 2 , 113–124.
  • Chomsky, N. (1955). The logical structure of linguistic theory . Manuscript, Harvard University. Published in 1975, New York: Plenum.
  • Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures . The Hague: Mouton.
  • Chomsky, N. (1959). Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Language , 35 , 26–58.
  • Chomsky, N. (1963). Formal properties of grammars. In R. Duncan Luce , R. R. Bush , & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (pp. 323–418). New York: Wiley.
  • Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (1970a). Remarks on nominalization. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 184–221). Waltham, MA: Ginn.
  • Chomsky, N. (1970b). Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. In R. Jakobson & S. Kawamoto (Eds.), Studies in general and Oriental linguistics presented to Shirô Hattori on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (pp. 52–91). Tokyo: TEX.
  • Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. R. Anderson & P. Kiparsky (Eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle (pp. 232–286). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
  • Chomsky, N. (1977). On wh -movement. In P. W. Culicover , T. Wasow , & A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal syntax (pp. 71–132). New York: Academic Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
  • Chomsky, N. (1986a). Knowledge of language . New York: Praeger.
  • Chomsky, N. (1986b). Barriers . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2000a). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In R. Martin , D. Michaels , & J. Uriagereka (Eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik (pp. 89–155). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2000b). New horizons in the study of language and mind . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2004). Beyond explanatory adequacy. In A. Belletti (Ed.), The cartography of syntactic structures (Vol. 3, pp. 104–131). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry , 36 , 1–22.
  • Chomsky, N. (2006). Language and mind , 3d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2007). Approaching UG from below. In U. Sauerland & H.‑M. Gärtner (Eds.), Interfaces + recursion = language? Chomsky’s minimalism and the view from syntax-semantics (pp. 1–29). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian Linguistics , 3d ed. Edited by J. McGilvray . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (2013). Problems of projection. Lingua , 130 , 33–49.
  • Chomsky, N. (2015). Problems of projection: Extensions. In E. Di Domenico , C. Hamann , & S. Matteini (Eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti (pp. 1–16). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Chomsky, N. , & Halle, M. (1968). The sound pattern of English . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, N. , & Lasnik, H. (1977). Filters and control. Linguistic Inquiry , 8 , 425–504.
  • Chomsky, N. , & Lasnik, H. (1993). The theory of principles and parameters. In J. Jacobs , A. von Stechow , W. Sternefeld , & T. Venneman (Eds.), Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research (Vol. 1, pp. 506–569). Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 9. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Chomsky, N. , & Schützenberger, M.-P. (1963). The algebraic theory of context-free languages. In P. Braffort & D. Hirschberg (Eds.), Computer programming and formal systems (pp. 118–161). Amsterdam: North Holland.
  • Cowie, F. (1999). What’s within? Nativism reconsidered . New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Harman, G. (Eds.). (1974). On Noam Chomsky: Critical essays . Garden City, NY: Anchor.
  • Harris, R.A. (1993). The linguistic wars . New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Huang, C.-T. J. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar . PhD diss. MIT.
  • Huck, G. J. , & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates . London: Routledge.
  • Jackendoff, R. (1969). Some rules of semantic interpretation for English . PhD diss. MIT.
  • Kaplan, R. M. , & Bresnan, J. (1982). Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In J. Bresnan (Ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 173–281). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Katz, J. , & Postal, P. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (1971). On generative semantics. In D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (Eds.), Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology (pp. 232–296). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical prerequisites . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Lasnik, H. , & Lohndal, T. (2010). Government-binding/principles and parameters theory. WIREs Cognitive Science , 1 , 40–50.
  • Lasnik, H. , & Otero, C. (2004). Chomsky. In P. Strazny (Ed.), Encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 205–208). London: Routledge.
  • Lohndal, T. , & Uriagereka, J. (2016). Third-factor explanations and Universal Grammar. In I. Roberts (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of universal grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • Otero, C. P. (Ed.). (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical assessments . 4 vols. London: Routledge.
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  • Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (Eds.). (1980). Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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noam chomsky short essay

Operatives using the SAGE air defence system in the ‘Blue Room’ at CFB North Bay, Ontario, Canada. 1963. Photo courtesy the Department of National Defence PCN4720

The two Chomskys

The us military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. how did it shape his thought.

by Chris Knight   + BIO

Noam Chomsky rose to fame in the 1960s and even now, in the 21st century, he is still considered one of the greatest intellectuals of all time. His prominence as a political analyst on the one hand, and theoretical linguist on the other, simply has no parallel. What remains unclear is quite how the two sides of the great thinker’s work connect up.

When I first came across Chomsky’s linguistic work, my reactions resembled those of an anthropologist attempting to fathom the beliefs of a previously uncontacted tribe. For anyone in that position, the first rule is to put aside one’s own cultural prejudices and assumptions in order to avoid dismissing every unfamiliar belief. The doctrines encountered may seem unusual, but there are always compelling reasons why those particular doctrines are the ones people adhere to. The task of the anthropologist is to delve into the local context, history, politics and culture of the people under study – in the hope that this may shed light on the logic of those ideas.

The tribe shaping Chomsky’s linguistics, I quickly discovered, was a community of computer scientists during the early years of the Cold War, employed to enhance electronic systems of command and control for nuclear war and other military operations. My book Decoding Chomsky (2016) was an attempt to explain the ever-changing intricacies of Chomskyan linguistics within this specific cultural and historical setting.

I took it for granted that the ideas people entertain are likely to be shaped by the kind of life they lead. In other words, I assumed that Chomsky’s linguistic theories must have been influenced by the fact that he developed them while working for the US military – an institution he openly despised.

This was Chomsky’s impossible dilemma. Somehow, he needed to ensure: a) that the research he was conducting for the US military did not interfere with his conscience; and b) that he could criticise the US military without inducing them to cease funding his research. His solution was to make sure that the two Noam Chomskys – one working for the US military and the other against it – shared no common ground.

He achieved this through a bold stroke of amputation. From the start of his academic career, no part of his scientific work would show up in his political activism, while no trace of his activism would be detectable in his science. Among the inevitable outcomes was a conception of language utterly divorced from what most of us mean by that term.

L anguage, for Chomsky, is a computational module restricted entirely to the individual, and devoid of communicative, cultural or social aspects. If it has any remaining purpose or function, it exists merely for talking to oneself. This novel and allegedly ‘scientific’ model of language was so extreme in its individualism and abstraction that, in the end, it proved of no use to anyone. Not even the US military could make any of it work.

Decoding Chomsky triggered a heated debate. Although reviewers were largely positive , Chomsky’s own response was that the ‘whole story is a wreck … complete nonsense throughout’. In a letter to the London Review of Books in 2017, he said that for anyone to suggest that the Pentagon once viewed his linguistics as important for future forms of war was too absurd to require comment. In 2019, in a considerably longer polemic , he accused me of continuing to spin a ‘web of deceit and misinformation’.

More recently, in an online interview with the physicist Lawrence Krauss in 2022, Chomsky suggested that those of us who raise the issue of his work for the Pentagon are just accusing him of ‘working for the war machine’. I concede that if that were my book’s message, Chomsky’s hostility would be easy to understand. But, in fact, I am saying something quite different.

He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices

Whether it’s Chomsky or anyone else, we all need to make a living. In a world where money talks, we’re often faced with a harsh choice – compromise on a point of principle or find ourselves out of work. One way or another, many of us have been there. To keep body and soul together, one version of ourselves colludes with the prevailing powers while another indignantly resists.

In 1955, Chomsky found himself in just such a situation. He had a PhD in linguistics but was unable to get a job at Harvard. So he went to see Jerome Wiesner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Wiesner was a self-described ‘military technologist’ who had helped set up the Sandia nuclear weapons laboratory and was now the director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. He was impressed with Chomsky and gave him a job, but the young recruit had few illusions about where he now worked. As he has confirmed in various interviews , MIT was ‘90 per cent Pentagon funded’, ‘almost everybody’ was involved in defence research, and he himself ‘was in a military lab’.

Chomsky was in no position to change any of this, but he could still avoid direct work on military technology. He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices, describing himself as a ‘technophobe’ who couldn’t handle anything more complicated than a tape recorder.

Of course, Chomsky had to do some work to keep his job. The solution he found was to confine himself to certain alleged yet previously unsuspected grammatical principles underlying every language in the world. If he succeeded, this would be an achievement on the scale of James Watson and Francis Crick’s stunning discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. It was this search for an invariant underlying pattern – which Chomsky termed Universal Grammar – that sustained his MIT career for more than six decades.

F or anyone familiar with Chomsky’s powerful anti-militarist writings, it’s astonishing to imagine that the US Department of Defense once considered his linguistic theories as a means to enhance their computerised systems of weapons command and control. Their dream was that commanders could type instructions in ordinary English instead of having to master specialised computer languages. Astonishing, certainly, but such hopes are made quite clear by US Air Force scientists from the period.

Take, for example, Colonel Edmund Gaines. In 1971, Gaines referred to the kind of language research that Chomsky had pioneered in these words:

We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.

That same year, Colonel Anthony Debons wrote :

Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop … languages for computer operations in military command and control systems.

Lieutenant Jay Keyser was a linguist recruited by Chomsky to MIT who later became Chomsky’s close friend and his ‘boss’ as head of MIT’s linguistics department. In articles from 1963 and 1965, Keyser highlighted various problems with the artificial languages then being used in the military’s command and control systems. He recommended instead an ‘English control language’, based on Chomsky’s ideas, that would enable commanders to use ordinary English when communicating with their weapons systems. Keyser illustrated his argument with references to missiles and B-58 nuclear-armed bombers using sample sentences such as :

  • B-58’s will refuel.
  • B-58’s must be on base.
  • The bomber the fighter attacked landed safely.

An Air Force-sponsored offshoot of MIT called the MITRE Corporation was particularly interested in such ideas. MITRE’s linguists were led by the former MIT researcher Donald Walker who, in 1969, explained : ‘our linguistic inspiration was (and still is) Chomsky’s transformational approach’.

The one place we might have expected the fiercely anti-militarist Chomsky to avoid would be MITRE

As many as 10 of Chomsky’s students played ‘a key role’ in MITRE’s linguistics research, and, in a report from 1962, Walker and his colleagues were quite clear that they intended to enhance ‘the design and development of US Air Force-supplied command and control systems’. MITRE’s original mission had been to design such systems for nuclear war but, by 1967, almost a quarter of the corporation’s resources were focused on the Vietnam War. MITRE’s role in that war included overseeing the technical side of the McNamara Line. This was a massive hi-tech project consisting of a barrier of sensors, mines and cluster bombs along the border between North and South Vietnam – a barrier that was intended to finally crush the Vietnamese resistance.

In light of all this, the one place we might have expected the fiercely anti-militarist Chomsky to avoid would be MITRE. But it appears that the career pressures he faced at MIT meant that, from 1963, Chomsky felt obliged to work directly for the corporation. We know this because two MITRE research papers name Chomsky as a ‘consultant’ and both papers are quite clear that this research concerns the ‘development of a program to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control’. We also know from Chomsky’s former students that he visited MITRE’s laboratories on several occasions in this consultancy role.

One of these students, Barbara Partee, told me that Walker convinced the military to hire her and other MIT linguists on the basis that:

… in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.

Partee qualified her statement by saying she is not sure anyone quite believed this justification. She also pointed out that any ‘basic research’ that might help the military might also benefit wider society. This is true. But it’s also true that the ability to communicate with computers in English would have given the US an important military advantage. Consequently, Chomsky’s students had to try to convince themselves that they weren’t guilty of colluding with the military. As Partee says :

For a while, the Air Force was convinced that supporting pure research in generative grammar was a national priority, and we all tried to convince ourselves that taking Air Force money for such purposes was consistent with our consciences, possibly even a benign subversion of the military-industrial complex.

One student, Haj Ross, even told me that he ‘never had any whiff of military work at MITRE’. But this all rather reminds me of the biologist Jonathan King’s comments about the level of self-delusion among MIT’s students in the 1980s:

There were hundreds and hundreds of physics and engineering graduate students working on these weapons, who never said a word, not a word … So you’d go and have a seminar on the issue they’re just working on; you know, they’re working on the hydrodynamics of an elongated object passing through a deloop fluid at high speed. ‘Well, isn’t that a missile?’ – ‘No, I’m just working on the basic principle; nobody works on weapons.’

I n the 1960s, MITRE weren’t the only specialists in nuclear war command and control who were interested in Chomsky’s ideas. Researchers at the System Development Corporation were also trying to develop machines that could understand English commands, examples being ‘Blue fighter go to Boston’ and ‘Where are the fighters?’ According to A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 (2003) by Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, these researchers ‘were paying close attention to Chomsky’s work and sometimes used Chomsky as a consultant.’

Fortunately, none of these military scientists managed to get Chomsky’s theories to actually work. Although MITRE’s linguists did produce what they called a ‘transformational grammar’ for ‘military planning files’, they don’t appear to have got much further, and the Pentagon’s generous funding for Chomsky’s linguistics eventually fell away.

Chomsky still seems to regret this loss of funding, claiming that it came without strings attached. As he explained in his 2022 interview with Krauss:

The Pentagon was the best funder ever . They didn’t care what you were doing … Nobody in the Left can understand that. They assume that if you’re working on problems of philosophy, and for the defence department, you must be working for the war machine!

Chomsky made similar points in a 2015 t alk where he also mentioned that ‘a couple of generals’ would sometimes visit his workplace at MIT but otherwise there wasn’t much surveillance. Evidently, these generals were following in the tradition of General Dwight Eisenhower who, in 1946, directed that military scientists must be given ‘the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research’.

MITRE’s linguists always understood that ‘any imaginable military application would be far in the remote future’

Chomsky’s claim that the Pentagon ‘didn’t care’ what he was doing is one that he has made on several occasions. But it is in stark contrast to the documentary evidence. It seems that being an anti-militarist working in a military lab created a situation in which Chomsky has no choice but to hold contradictory ideas about his working environment. So while he has always known, as he said in a debate with Michel Foucault in 1971, that MIT was ‘a major institution of war-research’, he also needs to believe that ‘the Pentagon was not funding war work’ at MIT, as he said in an interview with Rebecca Schein in 2011.

Chomsky seemed equally conflicted when, in 2019, I raised the issue of his consultancy work for MITRE. While he usually dismisses any suggestion that the military funded his linguistics in the hope of military applications, on this occasion he resorted to a quite different argument: MITRE’s linguists, he said (while summarising Barbara Partee), always understood that ‘any imaginable military application would be far in the remote future’.

While this sort of reasoning might have reassured Chomsky’s students, it is unlikely to have reassured Chomsky. Consider his response when his wife Carol began working on an Air Force project in 1959. This MIT-based project was intended to enable people to communicate with computers in ‘natural language’, one aim being to enhance ‘military command and control systems’. We have it from the project’s head, Bert Green, that Noam was ‘very nervous’ about all this and needed reassurance that Carol wasn’t working on ‘voice activated command and control systems’.

I f Chomsky was nervous then, he must have been even more nervous when he found himself working for MITRE and the System Development Corporation, both of which were committed to designing computer systems for use in a nuclear war. To appreciate quite how much this must have troubled Chomsky, we need only recall his response when he heard the news of the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945. As he said in an interview with C J Polychroniou in 2019:

I was then a junior counsellor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened – and then went off to the planned activity – a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours.

Chomsky was similarly shocked when Philip Morrison, a scientist who had worked on the Hiroshima bomb, told him that he couldn’t remember any discussion about the consequences of what he and his colleagues were doing until after the bomb had been used:

These are some of the most brilliant human beings in the world – very humane, European culture, high culture – not just engineers … [But they’re] so immersed in the challenging technical problems of getting this thing to work that they were simply not considering what the effects would be until afterwards!

Chomsky was always dismayed at how ‘brilliant’ people could so guiltlessly stoke up the possibility of destroying the human race. He was also well aware of the role of MIT’s managers in organising and giving focus to such brilliance.

Maybe Wiesner’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual. But I doubt it

Take MIT’s vice-president in the early 1960s, General James McCormack. He supervised the university’s Center for Communication Science which naturally included MIT’s linguists. Perhaps McCormack’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual – but I doubt it. After all, he was the general who had supervised the creation of the Pentagon’s entire nuclear weapons stockpile.

Or take Wiesner, who not only recruited Chomsky to MIT but who, in 1960, co-founded the university’s linguistics programme. Wiesner later became MIT’s provost and then president which, in effect, made him Chomsky’s boss for more than 20 years. Now, maybe Wiesner’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual. But, again, I doubt it, considering he played a significant role in setting up the Pentagon’s entire nuclear missile programme, as well as its computerised air-defence systems.

By 1961, Wiesner had become President John F Kennedy’s science adviser. According to one of his MIT colleagues, Wiesner was well suited for the role as he was ‘soaked’ in military work such as ‘submarine warfare, air defence, atom bombs, guerrilla warfare, civil defence, and psychological warfare’. By the mid-1960s, Wiesner’s air-defence research at MIT had evolved into what Life magazine described as ‘the backbone of the American field communications in Vietnam’. Meanwhile, various laboratories at MIT continued to research helicopter design, radar, smart bombs and counter-insurgency techniques for use in that brutal war.

W hile Chomsky could sometimes ignore what was going on all around him, he couldn’t do this all the time. We know this from his own words, in a letter from 1967, published by The New York Review of Books :

I have given a good bit of thought to … resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of ‘defense’.

So why didn’t Chomsky resign? Partly, I suspect, it was because MIT’s managers were so impressed with his linguistics work that by 1966 they’d given him a named professorship, which, as Chomsky recalled in a talk in 1995, ‘isolated me from the alumni and government pressures’. This meant that, although there was still a risk of prosecution and even imprisonment for his anti-war activism, there was now no direct risk to his MIT career.

This fortuitous situation enabled Chomsky to throw himself into campaigning against the Pentagon while remaining in a career largely funded by that same Pentagon. Among various motives for this shift into activism was undoubtedly a sense of guilt that this career had been so generously funded by the very institution that was, at this time, so brutally attacking Vietnam. As Chomsky told Ron Chepesiuk in 1992, he had reached a point, by 1964, where ‘it got so horrible over there that I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore.’ By 1968, he was telling various journalists not only that he felt ‘guilty’ for waiting so long before protesting against the Vietnam War, but that he felt ‘guilty most of the time’.

Of course, if Chomsky’s linguistic theories had actually worked – if they had enhanced the Pentagon’s ability to inflict death and destruction across the globe – then he would have had still more reason to feel guilty. Such disturbing thoughts can only have deepened Chomsky’s determination to critique the US military-industrial complex – a critique whose credibility was only strengthened by the fact that he was someone from MIT, someone from inside that very complex.

Chomsky’s critiques were particularly inspiring to MIT’s more radical students and, by 1969, these students had pushed the university into a major crisis over its ongoing war research – a crisis that Chomsky did his best to resolve by opposing student demands to simply end this research. Instead, he proposed that MIT should restrict itself to war research ‘of a purely defensive and deterrent character’.

His anxieties would have kept narrowing his focus to the more abstract yet unrealistic aspects of his linguistics

Of course, the US Department of Defense describes almost all its activities in terms of defence and deterrence. Indeed, Chomsky’s position had some similarities with that of Wiesner who himself became quite critical of both the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. Although Wiesner’s opinions never stopped him from continuing to administer a huge military research programme at MIT, his liberalism did help create an atmosphere in which it was quite acceptable for MIT’s scientists to criticise the Pentagon for misusing the weaponry that they themselves had invented.

Now perhaps Chomsky was also content to do military research, secure in the knowledge that he could later criticise the military if they ever misused his work. But I doubt whether such wishful thinking could really have appeased Chomsky’s conscience. It seems to me more likely that his anxieties would have kept narrowing his focus to the more abstract, other-worldly and ‘beautiful’ yet unrealistic aspects of his linguistics – resisting any pressure to delve into the kinds of messy practicalities that might actually have led to weapons.

When the Pentagon funded basic research on MIT’s campus, it was always in the hope that it might lead to the development of actual weapons in various off-campus labs. But maintaining a clear distinction between basic research (on-campus) and practical applications (off-campus) was never going to be easy. As Chomsky himself says, academics and students were moving between MIT’s campus and its off-campus military labs ‘all the time’.

Despite this, the illusion of a distinction felt comforting to many at MIT. As we’ve seen, it enabled the university’s physics and engineering students to claim that they were ‘just working on the basic principle; nobody works on weapons.’ Chomsky felt he needed to take this idea as far as anyone could. And if the issue of MIT’s military work did come up, the convenient on-campus/off-campus distinction enabled him to claim, as he did in a conference hosted by University College London in 2017, that:

MIT itself did not have war work, war-related work, on the campus … In fact, the only exception was, at that time, the Political Science Department.

Chomsky is on firm ground here in pointing to the military work of MIT’s political and social scientists, some of whom advised US policy-makers on counter-insurgency and bombing campaigns in Vietnam. But to imply that MIT’s natural scientists weren’t also complicit is quite wrong, especially when we know that Wiesner recruited 11 natural scientists from MIT to work on the McNamara Line. Chomsky must be aware of this, but he was determined to see his linguistics as a particularly ‘pure’ form of natural science on a campus where this kind of science was considered – at least officially – free of military involvement.

On a political level, this approach seems to have helped quieten Chomsky’s conscience. On a scientific level, however, you can get only so far by conducting linguistics as if, like maths or physics, it was a branch of natural science. Since language is intrinsically a social phenomenon, it simply cannot be understood this way.

I n the 1940s and ’50s, when computing was new and exciting, it was tempting to explore the idea that there might exist in the human mind/brain a computer-like ‘device’ or ‘mechanism’ that could account for our ability to speak. But from the 1960s onwards, as these investigations kept failing, dissenters among Chomsky’s supporters kept breaking away, insisting that historical, social and cultural phenomena had to be brought back in.

Chomsky, however, refused to move even an inch in that direction, his justification being that natural science is the only genuine kind of science, so-called ‘social science’ being nothing more than reactionary ideology. With this in mind, Chomsky made the striking claim that a rigorously ‘natural’ science of language is realistic in view of the fact that language itself is not social at all, having no significant function in terms of the communication of thoughts or ideas. In his book On Nature and Language (2001), he writes:

[L]anguage … is not properly regarded as a system of communication … [although it] can of course, be used for communication, as can anything people do – manner of walking or style of clothes or hair, for example.

So, according to Chomsky, language did not evolve to facilitate communication any more than people’s legs, clothes or hair did!

Most readers of Aeon will assume that our capacity for language must have evolved among our distant ancestors through natural selection. Most will assume that language is not so much a system for thinking in private as a means of expressing our thoughts so others can share in them. You will probably take it that language is inseparably connected with social life and hence with history, politics and culture. You might also assume that, although children are genetically equipped with the necessary linguistic capacities, they actually acquire their first language by learning from and interacting with those around them. Chomsky, however, rejects each one of these ideas.

Chomsky’s determination to free language from all connection drove him to bizarre conclusions

For example, in the paper ‘Three Factors in Language Design’ (2005), he claims that the biological capacity for language did not evolve but appeared suddenly when the brain of a single early human was ‘rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation’. From that moment, this mutant individual supposedly used language not to communicate with others but only for silent thinking. In interviews with James McGilvray in 2012, Chomsky argues that, even today, people use language 99.9 per cent of the time for talking to themselves.

Chomsky’s determination to free language from all connection with society, politics, history or culture – all connection, in other words, with the political activist side of his life – is evidently what drove him to these bizarre conclusions. It eventually drove him to the claim that words, or the concepts behind them, are lodged in the brain from birth – having become fixed in our genes at the moment when our species first emerged.

When challenged to explain how this idea could possibly apply to words such as ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘carburettor’ – things that clearly didn’t exist when humans first evolved – Chomsky held his ground. Like all lexical concepts, he insisted in his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000), they must have been genetically installed thousands of years before real bureaucrats or carburettors had been invented.

When MIT’s Jerry Fodor took Chomsky’s side on this issue, his rival philosopher Daniel Dennett expressed astonishment, writing in Consciousness Explained (1991): ‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’ Perhaps ‘Aristotle had an innate airplane concept,’ Dennett continued, ‘but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet ? What about the concept of an APEX fare Boston/London round trip ?’ Despite the hilarity, Chomsky has continued to defend the idea.

C homsky embraces genetic determinism in an equally extreme form when discussing how a child acquires its first language. He claims that no child needs social learning to do this. Since all the world’s languages have been genetically installed in each individual from birth, says Chomsky, the child just needs to run through its internal library of languages and, by a process of elimination, compute which particular one to activate. As Chomsky said in a lecture at the University of Rochester in 2016:

It’s pretty clear that a child approaches the problem of language acquisition by having all possible languages in its head. It doesn’t know which language it’s being exposed to. And, as data comes along, that class of possible languages reduces. So certain data comes along, and the mind automatically says: ‘OK, it’s not that language, it’s some other language.’

Yet even while championing such extreme genetic determinism, Chomsky has in recent years happily swung over to the opposite extreme, suggesting that the role of distinctively human genetics may in fact be zero. This would be the case if Universal Grammar turned out to be a fundamental principle of language across the entire Universe. On this basis, bizarrely, Chomsky has since extended his claims to the languages of extraterrestrials, arguing at the International Space Development Conference in 2018 that Universal Grammar may prove to be universal not just among Earth-dwellers but on any planet in the Universe.

In ‘Rethinking Universality’ (2020), Chomsky and his co-author Jeffrey Watumull suggest that ‘any language anywhere in the Universe would resemble human language’. Not only that, they and their co-author Ian Roberts go on to argue in ‘Universal Grammar’ (2023) that any intelligent extraterrestrials would likely be endowed with ‘human-style linguistic “software”, thus eliminating any principled limit to effective communication [between aliens and humans].’ Certainly no one could accuse Chomsky and his supporters of being too cautious in their claims!

Not one of his ever-changing theoretical approaches has survived the test of time

I mentioned at the outset that my job as an anthropologist isn’t just to describe Chomsky’s strange ideas or find fault with them. It is to understand why he found it necessary to arrive at them. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that, given his institutional situation at MIT, Chomsky felt obliged to follow two basic principles: firstly, he would pursue natural science to the total exclusion of politically suspect social science; and, secondly, he would keep his natural science ‘basic’ or ‘pure’ – that is, uncontaminated by the moral danger of any practical military applications.

Even while continuing to admire Chomsky, most of his former supporters would now agree that, when tested in the light of how language actually works, not one of his ever-changing theoretical approaches has survived the test of time. Their most fundamental flaw was always their abstraction, in particular their insulation from social engagement and from the messy complexities of human life.

In Explain Me This (2019), the influential theoretical linguist Adele Goldberg makes the point that to study written sentences in isolation – the Chomskyan strategy favoured by most theoretical linguists until recently – may be ‘akin to studying animals in separate cages in a zoo’. Writing in 2016, the prominent evolutionary linguist and child psychologist Michael Tomasello and the developmental psychologist Paul Ibbotson summed up the prevailing consensus by observing that Chomsky’s ‘Universal Grammar appears to have reached a final impasse.’

Tomasello and Ibbotson are right. Not one of Chomsky’s models of Universal Grammar has proved workable. Each new variant has turned out to be not just mistaken but fundamentally useless. Although the Pentagon’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has rekindled some interest in Chomskyan grammar for what they call ‘future combat systems’, there’s no reason to believe that today’s military linguists will be any more successful than their predecessors.

This raises an interesting question. If the entire Chomskyan paradigm was a mistake, then how can we explain its lasting influence? Even when they proved unworkable, Chomsky’s theories retained their initial aura of promise and excitement, as if some extraordinary breakthrough was about to be achieved. In likening his intended reconstruction of linguistics to the accomplishments of Descartes and Galileo, Chomsky raised himself to a plane far higher than any rival theoretician, offering hope for nothing less than a world-changing scientific revolution.

In the early days, transformational grammar’s apparent endorsement by the Pentagon played a decisive public relations role. Previously, a linguist would most likely be some kind of anthropologist making notes about the language spoken in some marginalised community or little-known tribe. The prospect of such a scholar enjoying funding from the military would have seemed absurd. Chomsky’s arrival changed everything. Few people knew precisely why the Pentagon were so interested in his thinking, but the fact that they seemed interested did his institutional status no harm.

But there is more to it than that. My own suspicion is that, for Chomsky’s institutional milieu, his ideas just had to be true. Endorsing Chomsky meant endorsing his picture of language as a digital computational device. To any computer scientist, that was an attractive idea. Chomsky’s programme promised to elevate a generation of military-sponsored computer scientists to the status not merely of electronics engineers but philosophers in the tradition of Plato and Descartes, geniuses delving into the greatest of all mysteries – the ultimate nature of human language and mind. Right or wrong, it was clearly too attractive a vision to be lightly set aside. Even to this day, despite decades of disappointment and failure, the vision still enjoys passionate support.

F or anyone in my position as an admirer of Chomsky’s political activism, it feels risky to say things that can so easily be misunderstood. No part of my account can detract from Chomsky’s unparalleled record as an activist. Neither can it detract from his persistence in putting up with the pressures and contradictions that inevitably came with a career at MIT.

noam chomsky short essay

Chomsky alongside members of the Student Mobilization Committee at a Boston University ‘Laos’ teach-in. Boston on Feb. 9, 1971. Photo by Cary Wolinsky/The Boston Globe via Getty

Many of Chomsky’s activist supporters have been shocked to discover that their hero has been on friendly terms not only with the former head of the CIA, John Deutch, but also with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it would have been impossible for Chomsky to maintain his position at MIT for so long without associating with all sorts of dubious establishment figures. As Chomsky told The Harvard Crimson in 2023 of his meetings with Epstein: ‘I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.’ For me, Chomsky’s association with Epstein was a serious error. I also believe, however, that had Chomsky been so principled and pure as to refuse to work at MIT, then he might never have gained the platform he needed to inspire so many of us to oppose both militarism and the even greater threat of climate catastrophe.

There are times when we all have to make compromises, some more costly than others. In Chomsky’s case, it was his attempt at a new understanding of language that suffered most from the institutional contradictions he faced. Despite the failure of his attempted revolution in linguistics, Chomsky’s political activism remains an inspiration.

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Essay on Chomsky's contribution to modern linguistics

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Mohammed Nasser

The study of linguistics has grown up in many widely separated parts of the Western world. Often one individual or a small group of original minds has founded a tradition which has continued to mould approaches to language in the university or the nation in which that tradition began; between adherents of different traditions there has usually been relatively limited contact. Hence this book. It cannot fail to be an advantage to any student of linguistics (whether he is a 'student' in the formal or the amateur sense) to learn something of the ideas that have been current in traditions other than the one with which he is most familiar. This is not only because some of the ideas he has been taught as received truth are likely to be wrong (although I do believe that there are fundamental errors in the thinking of the most fashionable contemporary linguistic school, and I hope this book may encourage questioning of those points). In many cases one school has directed its attention to issues which simply have not been considered by another school, so that one can gain by studying other orthodoxies without necessarily rejecting any elements of one's own. Furthermore, it is impossible fully to appreciate a scholar's ideas without some understanding of the intellectual atmosphere within which, and in reaction to which, those ideas were evolved; so that one needs to learn something about past theories if only, in some cases, to see why they were wrong

noam chomsky short essay

The study of linguistics has grown up in many widely separated parts of the Western world. Often one individual or a small group of original minds has founded a tradition which has continued to mold approaches to language in the university or the nation in which that tradition began; between adherents of different traditions there has usually been relatively limited contact. Hence this book. It cannot fail to be an advantage to any student of linguistics (whether he is a 'student' in the formal or the amateur sense) to learn something of the ideas that have been current in traditions other than the one with which he is most familiar. This is not only because some of the ideas he has been taught as received truth are likely to be wrong (although I do believe that there are fundamental errors in the thinking of the most fashionable contemporary linguistic school and I hope This book may encourage questioning of those points).

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Nafila S A B R I Qudissya

One of the most important linguistic developments that took place in the middle of the twentieth century is the emergence of the transformational generative grammar. Therefore, it is of importance when dealing with any historical linguistic phenomenon is studying the historical achievements of Arab as well as European linguists who studied the Arabic and English grammars thoroughly and entirety in addition to s those who preceded Noam Chomsky who made a linguistic revolution in Europe at that time. Throughout the history of the long Arabic language, great scientists have come to record their arts and sciences in countless works, but they have pioneers who took the lead in the branches of the main language sciences, and all those who followed them went on the same path to add some new advancements which deal with the most precise details and issues of the language. Sibawayah is considered one of the most prominent grammarian of the Arabic language. He was followed by many other scholars in their extensive studies of the Arabic language, such as Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad Al-Farahidi, Abed Al-Qaher Al-Jarjani, Ibn Jinni and others. This study is not an attempt to underestimate what Chomsky has done in his intellectual linguistic revolution of today but rather to find the roots of the Chomskyan theory in the Arab world, and to show the precedence of dealing with the same linguistic issues that Sibawayah put forward in his book despite the spacing of times and countries.

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Requiem for the American Dream

34 pages • 1 hour read

Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power

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Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky evaluates the rise of income inequality in the US over the last 40 years. It argues that the main consequence of neoliberalism , which has increased since the 1970s, is a dramatic concentration of wealth and power to the elite—at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Chomsky observes how rapid financialization since the 1940s, as banks and other institutions prioritize the “plutocracy” over the general population as their main clientele, shifted power to the wealthy. With the rising cost of running electoral campaigns and a broadening of corporate rights in the US, the extremely wealthy gained the means to affect political decisions for personal benefit and undermined the core principle of democracy.

First published in 2017 by Seven Stories Press, Requiem for the American Dream was a textual adaptation of the 2015 documentary by the same name, which was edited and directed by Peter Hutchinson, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott.

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Requiem for the American Dream presents 10 thematic principles that reveal how US elites deliberately undermine democratic processes to maximize their power and control over the people. Each principle contains smaller thematic categories, and the title of each principle and subcategory prefaces its content. At the end of each principle is a collection of various excerpts from relevant outside sources, all of which Chomsky cites and analyzes in the body of the principle.

Chomsky opens with a Preface (“A Note on the American Dream”), which examines today’s socioeconomic conditions and compares them with those of the Great Depression. Next, the Introduction offers a definition of democracy and evaluates the US system against it. Principle 1 (“Reduce Democracy”) demonstrates how corporations and elites uphold the Madisonian principle of governance, which dictates that a small, “enlightened” group of elites should control society and design policy as they see fit to prevent uncontrolled democracy. In Principle 2 (“Shape Ideology”), Chomsky reveals how corporations reacted strongly to the social gains of the 1960s and responded by ideologically repressing democratic processes through a coordinated attack beginning in the 1970s. Principle 3 (“Redesign the Economy”) supports the ideas of the previous principle and explores how businesses maximize their power through two economic strategies: financialization and offshoring .

In Principle 4 (“Shift the Burden”), Chomsky argues that businesses shifted their target audience from the domestic market to the global “plutonomy,” effectively shifting the burden of upholding society onto the people. Principle 5 (“Attack Solidarity”) points out that corporations focus on short-term goals to maximize profit, which often results in irresponsible decisions that are profoundly selfish and undemocratic. This challenges the very concept of solidarity , which Chomsky defines as the altruistic care of others—and a core value for a healthy society. In Principle 6 (“Run the Regulators”), Chomsky details how corporations buy regulators to ensure that policy or law supports corporate rights. Principle 7 (“Engineer Elections”) expands on this idea by highlighting how deeply corporations can influence elections and policy—often at the expense of the people—and how this erodes US democracy.

In Principle 8 (“Keep the Rabble in Line”), Chomsky emphasizes how corporations attack organized labor, such as unions, to protect corporate rights. By exercising control over the media and education, businesses attempt to erase class consciousness in the general population. Principle 9 (“Manufacture Consent”) explains the reasoning behind the coordinated attack on organized labor. Chomsky points out that in democratic societies, the people naturally hold the power, so the minority elite must maintain control by finding ways to manufacture consent—as they do by deterring people from coming together and instead encouraging mindless consumption. The author closes with Principle 10 (“Marginalize the Population”), which observes how US businesses and politicians mobilize hate and fear to successfully turn groups of people against one another—even when their interests align. Chomsky ends by noting that because governments and corporate interests now have the power to destroy humanity (via nuclear weapons and the economically protected instruments of climate change), our survival as a species depends on people coming together and fighting for a better social system.

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By Noam Chomsky

Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky

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On Anarchism

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192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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Anarchy - a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems. Synonyms: lawlessness, an absence of government, nihilism, mobocracy, revolution, insurrection, riot, rebellion, mutiny, disorder, disorganization, misrule, chaos, tumult, turmoil, mayhem, pandemonium.
Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as "an aberration" nearly unique to this country, a theory of "a world built on hatred" that would self-destruct in three seconds."Yet the vitality of this once- or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election cycle when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the Republican debates thanks to his impressively youthful "army" fighting for this "rEVOLution". This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn Rand's novels.
The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man." But anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." It insists that "socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of anarchism." From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. ---------------- WOMAN: "Professor Chomsky, on a slightly different topic, there's a separate meaning of the word "anarchy" different from the one you often talk about-namely, "chaos." NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, it's a bum crap, basically – it's like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as "socialism," or any other term of discourse that's been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideology warfare. I mean, "chaos" is a meaning of the word, but it's not meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos"–in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below. ---------------- MAN: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly? NOAM CHOMSKY: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, libertarian has a special meaning in the United States. The US is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist–because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. ---------------- QUESTION: These experiences we've described, you were saying they led you into linguistics, but also led you into your view of politics and of the world. You're a libertarian anarchist, and when one hears that, because of the way issues are framed in this country (U.S.A), there are many misperceptions. Help us understand what that means. NOAM CHOMSKY: The US is sort of out of the world on this topic. Here, the term "libertarian" means the opposite of what it always meant in history. Libertarian throughout modern European history meant socialist anarchist. It meant the anti-state element of the Workers' Movement and the Socialist Movement. Here it means ultra–conversative, Ayn Rand or Cato Institute or something like that. In Europe, it meant, and always meant to me, an antistate branch of socialism, which meant to me, an antistate branch of socialism, which meant highly organized society, nothing to do with chaos, but based on democracy all the way through. That means democratic control of communities, of workplaces, of federal structures, built on systems of voluntary association, spreading internationally. That's traditional anarchism.

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Noam Chomsky and His Theory of Language Acquisition Device

Children’s first language acquisition under the scope of noam chomsky’s nativist theory, analysis of noam chomsky’s principles of concentration of wealth and power, rhetorical analysis of noam chomsky’s prospects for survival, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Analysis of Noam Chomsky’s Use of Persuasive Methods

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A Study of Chomsky’s Writings on The Cambodian Genocide

Critical analysis on genie’s story: chomsky and skinner's theories, the comparison of grammars in noam chomsky's syntactic structures theory, a brief introduction into noam chomsky language theory, relevant topics.

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  1. A Conversation With Prof Noam Chomsky 2015

  2. Noam Chomsky speaks on shifting political parties

  3. Noam Chomsky on the striking features of American culture

  4. Chat GPT and the Control Society

  5. Noam Chomsky on difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism #chomsky #zionism #israel #gaza

  6. Noam Chomsky : US Strikes Houthi Targets As Israel-Hamas War Rages

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  1. Noam Chomsky

    Category: History & Society In full: Avram Noam Chomsky Born: December 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. (age 95) Notable Works: "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies" "Syntactic Structures" "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory" (Show more) Subjects Of Study:

  2. The Responsibility of Intellectuals

    " The Responsibility of Intellectuals " is an essay by the American academic Noam Chomsky, which was published as a special supplement by The New York Review of Books on 23 February 1967. [1] [2] [3] Content

  3. Noam Chomsky: Biography, Linguistics, Books, Quotes & Education

    (1928-) Who Is Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky was an intellectual prodigy who went on to earn a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT...

  4. Noam Chomsky Critical Essays

    Noam Chomsky 1928- (Full name Avram Noam Chomsky) American linguist, nonfiction writer, essayist, lecturer, and critic. The following entry presents an overview of Chomsky's career...

  5. The Responsibility of Intellectuals

    The Responsibility of Intellectuals Noam Chomsky The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967 TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals.

  6. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

    " Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship " is an essay by the American academic Noam Chomsky. [1] It was first published as part of Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins. [2] Parts of the essay were delivered as a lecture at New York University in March 1968, as part of Albert Schweitzer Lecture Series. [3]

  7. PDF Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky

    In his first published essay on politics, Noam Chomsky announced his conviction that '[i]t is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.'1 Acting on that conviction, Chomsky has long supple- mented his work in linguistics with writing on contemporary political

  8. Noam Chomsky

    Published online: 22 August 2017 Summary Noam Avram Chomsky is one of the central figures of modern linguistics. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. In 1945, Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Zellig Harris (1909-1992), a leading Structuralist, through their shared political interests.

  9. PDF Language and Mind

    Language and Mind This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory.

  10. Requiem for the American Dream

    Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power is a book by political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky. It was created and edited by Peter Hutchinson, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott. It lays out Chomsky's analysis of neoliberalism.

  11. An anthropologist studies the warring ideas of Noam Chomsky

    An anthropologist studies the warring ideas of Noam Chomsky | Aeon Essays The two Chomskys The US military's greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought? Operatives using the SAGE air defence system in the 'Blue Room' at CFB North Bay, Ontario, Canada. 1963.

  12. Essay on Chomsky's contribution to modern linguistics

    Often one individual or a small group of original minds has founded a tradition which has continued to mould approaches to language in the university or the nation in which that tradition began; between adherents of different traditions there has usually been relatively limited contact. Hence this book.

  13. Requiem for the American Dream Summary and Study Guide

    Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky evaluates the rise of income inequality in the US over the last 40 years. It argues that the main consequence of neoliberalism, which has increased since the 1970s, is a dramatic concentration of wealth and power to the elite—at the expense of the lower and ...

  14. chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website

    The Noam Chomsky Website. Visit The Chomsky Index for additional searches on Chomsky's works, including transcribed videos.

  15. Where to Start with Noam Chomsky: His Best Books

    Fateful Triangle (1983, 1999) Examining the relationship between the USA, Israel and Palestine, Fateful Triangle is one of Chomsky's most significant works. It was one of Norman Finkelstein's four recommended books for a beginner to read on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

  16. "There Are Reasons for Optimism"

    The following interview was conducted by John Nichols in coordination with Catalyst. In it, Chomsky touches on the rise of the far right today, relating it to interwar fascism, and then moves on to a wider discussion of the conjuncture. JN: When you were ten years old, you wrote a short essay on your concerns about the rise of fascism.

  17. On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

    3.72. 3,821 ratings377 reviews. On Anarchism is an essential introduction to the Noam Chomsky's political theory. On Anarchism sheds a much needed light on the foundations of Chomsky's thought, specifically his constant questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. The book gathers his essays and interviews to provide a short, accessible ...

  18. Noam Chomsky: the Renown Linguist and Scientist

    This essay has been submitted by a student. Noam Chomsky who is a noted linguist has contributed immensely to the field of linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, history and social criticism. He postulated the transformational generative grammar for which he obtained his PhD. His book titled, Syntactic Structures that was published in 1957 ...

  19. Noam Chomsky

    Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, ... Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". ... Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in 2017 ...

  20. On Noam Chomsky; critical essays : Harman, Gilbert, compiler : Free

    On Noam Chomsky; critical essays by Harman, Gilbert, compiler. Publication date 1974 Topics

  21. Noam Chomsky Essay Example For FREE

    NOAM CHOMSKY AS A PHILOSOPHER: - The knacks of Chomsky as a philosopher, just add to his overall greatness.Noam Chomsky is a well-known and thought provoking philosopher as well.

  22. chomsky.info : Articles

    Whamit! The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics. August 16, 2021. Chomsky and Prashad: The reality behind the US 'withdrawal' from Afghanistan. AlterNet. May 7, 2021. Inquiry needed into govts' Covid-19 failures. with Vijay Prashad. Asia Times. January 22, 2021.

  23. Essays on Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky and His Theory of Language Acquisition Device. 4 pages / 1599 words. In Noam Chomsky's paper "On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language", he discusses the study of language. Chomsky is coming from a rationalist point of view on language acquisition. He believes that the initial state of the language faculty is an input ...