Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a extreme socialist 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 or MIT[1].
He has always been extremely critical of America and Israel and sympathizes with Palestinians and terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. He has also been criticized for anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial[2].
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.
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 usto get his mother to talk to?
which are deemed by 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.
Further Readings
- The Chomsky Hoax by Paul Bogdanor
- An Intellectual Crook by Oliver Kamm
- Chomsky's New Blood Libel by Alan Dershowitz