"Chomsky" redirects here. For other uses, see Chomsky (disambiguation).
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky in 2017
Born
Avram Noam Chomsky
(1928-12-07) December 7, 1928 (age 96)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Spouses
Carol Schatz
(m. 1949; died )
Valeria Wasserman
(m. 2014)
Children
3, including Aviva
Father
William Chomsky
Awards
Education
University of Pennsylvania(BA, MA, PhD)
Thesis
Transformational Analysis (1955)
Doctoral advisor
Zellig Harris
Influences
Academic
J. L. Austin, William Chomsky, C. West Churchman, René Descartes, Galileo,Nelson Goodman, Morris Halle, Zellig Harris, Wilhelm von Humboldt, David Hume,Roman Jakobson, Immanuel Kant,George Armitage Miller, Pāṇini, Hilary Putnam,W. V. O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Ferdinand de Saussure, Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, Alan Turing,Ludwig Wittgenstein
Political
Mikhail Bakunin, Alex •
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in East Oak Lane, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Dr. William Chomsky, was a Hebrew grammarian, and his mother, Elsie Chomsky, was a teacher. The influence that Dr. Chomsky, a linguist, had on his son is fairly obvious. Even at a young age, his son used to read ancient and modern Hebrew texts. In his biography, Noam Chomsky, Robert Barsky remarks that while Chomsky's father fueled his academic aspirations, his mother was responsible for his political leanings: "Her political sensitivity motivated him, from a very young age, to look far beyond his immediate social context and into the realm of political action and involvement."
His official schooling began at Oak Lane Country Day School, run by Temple University. According to Barsky, this school emphasized creativity over performance. Each child was encouraged to perform according to his or her abilities, rather than compete against other students. However, Chomsky continued his education outside of the classroom, reading many "realist" authors such as D
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Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an Americanlinguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He was an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Linguistics
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Chomsky created the theory of generative grammar. This is one of the most important contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped start the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. He challenged the behaviorist way of looking at behavior and language. This was the main approach used in the 1950s. His natural approach to the study of language also changed the philosophy of language and mind. He also invented the Chomsky hierarchy, a way of looking at formal languages in terms of their power to explain language.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period. He was the eighth-most cited s