Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a linguist who is best known for his writings on politics. He is an institute professor & professor of linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [1]. He has always been very critical of American and Israeli foreign policy and sympathizes with Palestinians and, according to his opponents, terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah[2]. He has also been criticized for anti-Semitism.[3].
His opponents accuse him of expressing admiration for governmental systems such as the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cambodian governments which are characterized by central control, xenophobia, and rejection of free expression. Chomsky counters that he is merely pointing out the West's own "crimes" and not condoning authoritarian governments that the West opposes. Chomsky identifies himself as an anarcho-syndicalist who is opposed to both neoliberalism and authoritarianism. [4]
Linguistic Works
Generative Grammar
Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human brain has innate ability to generate gramatical sentences, thus all utterances which is deemed sensical to the speaker is necessarily grammatical, and the only role the liguist should play is to decipher its grammatical structure. This view has been criticized by many linguists as nihilistic in that it rejects the notion of ungrammatical sentences. Noam Chomsky also pointed to instances of infants utter grammatical sentence fragments they have not been taught before as evidence for Generative Grammar.
Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences. This theory of universal grammar has been criticized by linguist Geoffrey Sampson as being not falsifiable, arguing that the grammatical generalizations made are simply observations about existing languages and not predictions about what is possible in a language. To this day, the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.
For decades, Noam Chomsky and his followers have been trying to make sense of sentences such as:
Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?
which are deemed to be ungrammatical by a lot of linguists; by using techniques such as linking theory, anti-c-command requirement, A-positions, Bijection Principle, weakest crossover configurations, bound variable anaphora, asymmetric linking, licensing conditions, index of apronoun, null operator analysis, variable binding, configurational conditions, inappropriate and appropriate antecedents, etc.
See Also
- Video of Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah Leaders in Lebanon
- The Chomsky Hoax by Paul Bogdanor
- Grammar Without Grammaticality by Geoffrey Sampson
- Chomsky's New Blood Libel by Alan Dershowitz