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Noam Chomsky

Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Noam Chomsky is one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, a man who has wielded tremendous influence on a number of fields, especially linguistics and politics. He is equally admired for the work he has done as one of the major linguistic scientists in his long-held position as professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as he is for his brand of political activism that has made him one of the most recognized figures in the American political left and one of the eleven people who were “elected” to positions of responsibility in a theoretical global government (he came in fourth with Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and the Dalai Lama in first, second and third respectively.) His blend of scholarly activism makes him comparable with another famous intellectual, Bertrand Russell.

Among Chomsky’s most notable achievements is his creation of the theory of generative grammar, a system of linguistic analysis that disputed traditional linguistic views. It is often heralded as the greatest contribution to theoretical linguistics in the twentieth century.

Chomsky’s views have raised interesting questions about the evolutionary origins of language and whether the gap between human and animal communication is quantitative or insurmountably qualitative. Most have interpreted Chomsky as taking the view that human language is an all or nothing complex biological capacity. Humans are born with this capacity and other animals are not. In order to situate this view within an evolutionary context, Chomsky (followed by Bickerton and Pinker) appealed to the punctuated equilibrium model of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould to explain the sudden emergence of language (as opposed to a slow, gradual emergence that one would expect from Darwinian theory).

Web Resources On Noam Chomsky

Chomsky Info
Wikipedia: Noam Chomsky

Book Resources On Noam Chomsky

On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works by Noam Chomsky, Mitsou Ronat
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, et. al.

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