A slim 1957 book by Noam Chomsky upended how linguists study language
In 1957 a young MIT teacher published Syntactic Structures, arguing that grammar is a system of rules the mind generates rather than habits drilled in by reward. Reactions ranged from indifference to hostility, yet the book helped spark the cognitive revolution and made Noam Chomsky the most famous linguist alive.
Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on 7 December 1928 to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants; his father, a Hebrew scholar, ran a religious school and taught at Gratz College. Uncles in New York introduced him to left-wing debate and anarchist bookshops, and at ten he wrote his first article, about the 1939 fall of Barcelona. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at 16, paying his way by teaching Hebrew, and nearly quit for a kibbutz before the linguist Zellig Harris drew him into theoretical linguistics.
His honours thesis analysed the sound patterns of modern Hebrew using Harris's methods. From 1951 to 1955 he was a junior fellow at Harvard, influenced by the philosophers W. V. O. Quine and J. L. Austin, and developed transformational grammar, which earned him a doctorate in 1955. Roman Jakobson helped secure him a post at MIT that year, where he split his time between a machine translation project and teaching.
Syntactic Structures broke sharply with the dominant approach of Harris and Leonard Bloomfield; the linguist John Lyons later said it revolutionised the scientific study of language. Chomsky went on to create or co-create universal grammar, generative grammar, the hierarchy of formal languages that bears his name, and the minimalist program. His attacks on B. F. Skinner helped topple behaviourism in linguistics, and the fierce disputes his ideas provoked became known as the linguistics wars.
Alongside the science ran politics. His 1967 essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, opposing the Vietnam War, made him nationally known; he was arrested several times and landed on Richard Nixon's list of opponents. With Edward S. Herman he set out a propaganda model of news media in Manufacturing Consent. Now a professor at the University of Arizona and emeritus at MIT, he has written more than 150 books and is among the most cited living authors.
Source: Noam Chomsky
