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Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He created the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages important in the theory of computation. He is one of the most often cited authors in the humanities, although his views are controversial in many fields.

He is also well-known for his radical political activism. His beliefs, broadly classified as libertarian socialism, have earned him both a large following among the radical Left, as well as many detractors.

Contributions to Linguistics

In 1957 he wrote the book Syntactic Structures, an elaboration on his doctoral thesis from 1955, in which he introduces transformational grammars. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure, a distinction he doesn't use anymore). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and innate. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language generating/analysing system (a universal grammar) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.

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

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

His seminal work in phonology was The sound pattern of English. He published it together with Morris Halle.

Chomsky's theories went through many changes. The most recent account was published under the title The minimalist program in 1995. The first chapter deals with the theory of principles and paramaters which is in part speculation, the second emphasizes the role of economy in language. The third states a minimalist program for linguistic theory while the fourth categories and transformations gives an elaboration while at the same time changing some things layed out previously.

Chomsky's research interest is in the human language faculty that he calls I-language in his recent writings. He focuses on questions that consider the internal functioning of the brain. And there he looks at the language generating process rather than at the generated objects.

Political Views

Chomsky is one of the most well-known figures of the American left, often having speaking engagements more than 200 days a year, or scheduled more than two years in advance. His political position is normally classified libertarian socialism: he summarizes it as seeking out all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate them if they are unjustified. His main mode of actions include writing magazine articles and books, and making speaking engagements. He has a large following of supporters, especially anarchists and liberals, and an equally large group of critics, both conservative and liberal.

He has been a consistent and outspoken critic of the United States government. In his book, 9-11, a series of interviews in question and answer form about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, he claims that the United States is the most "terrorist" country of modern times. He has criticized the US for its involvement in the Vietnam War and the larger Indochina conflict; its interference in Latin American affairs in countries like Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and Argentina; and its military support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Chomsky focuses his most intense criticism on official friends of the United States government while criticizing official enemies like the former Soviet Union and the North Vietnamese Army only in passing. He explains this by the following principle: it is more important to evaluate actions which you have more possibility of affecting.

Chomsky is extremely critical of the policies of Israel towards the Palestinians and ethnic minority Jewish and Arab populations within Israel. His book The Fateful Triangle is viewed as one of the most important books on the Arab-Israeli conflict among some pro-Palestinians and on the far-left, especially among anarchists. He purports that Israel is a world leader in "guiding state terrorism" for selling weapons to countries that he characterizes as US puppet states, e.g. Guatemala in the 1970s or Turkey in the 1990s. In addition, he has repeatedly and vehemently condemned the US for its military and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American Jewish community for its role in obtaining this support.

He has many critics, conservative, liberal, and otherwise. The most outspoken of his critics include journalist David Horowitz, who has toured college campuses where Chomsky is popular distributing anti-Chomsky pamphlets, and Werner Cohn, who has written a full book on the subject of Chomsky's alleged anti-Semitism. Many hold that Chomsky has merely defended the universal and absolute right of free speech for everyone, and has never himself supported non-democratic ideologies. When Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote articles claiming American media exaggerated the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, many attacked him as an apologist for those atrocities. Many Jewish organizations, as well as a large number of non-Jewish academics, have levelled charges of anti-Semitism against him for his opposition to the concept of a Jewish state (not knowing that being an anarchist, Noam Chomsky is in opposition to the concept of any state), his support for total freedom of speech, even of holocaust-deniers. For a full discussion of this issue, see the article Chomsky and alleged anti-semitism.

One focus of his political work has been an analysis of mainstream media (especially in the United States) and its role in supporting "ruling class" interests. His book Manufacturing Consent -- The Political Economy of the Mass Media, also co-authored with Herman, explores this topic in depth, though almost all of his work incorporates some aspect of this analysis.

See also:

External links and further reading

Linguistics:

  • Noam Chomsky's own MIT homepage
  • Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures, The Hague, Mouton: 1965.
  • Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle: The Sound Pattern of English, Harper & Row, New York: 1968
  • Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct, W. Morrow & Co., New York: 1994
  • Noam Chomsky: The Minimalist Program, MIT press: 1995
  • A demonstration of a peculiarly primitive variety of computational linguistics: The Chomskybot

Politics:

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