May

10

Noam Chomsky and Transformational-Generative Grammar Theory

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by N.Fabisz

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7th, 1928 to Dr William Chomsky, who was “one of the world’s foremost Hebrew grammarians” (New York Times, 1977) and Elsie Simonofsky – also a Hebrew teacher. Chomsky completed his early education at Oak Lane Country Day School and Central High School, both in Philadelphia. In the year of 1945 Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied linguistics, mathematics and philosophy, yet in 1947 he decided to major in linguistics. It was then when he came in contact with Zelling Harris, the father of discourse analysis, who had enormously influenced the young Chomsky: “he had a coherent understanding of this whole range of issues, which I lacked, and I was immensely attracted by it, and by him personally as well” (Barsky R.F. 1998:50). His BA thesis entitled “Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew” from 1949 was later revised and submitted as an MA thesis in 1951, to be finally published in 1979. In the subsequent years of 1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, where he carried out most of his Ph.D. research. In 1955 he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled “Transformational Analysis”. In the same year of 1955 Chomsky was offered a faculty position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he had been an educator ever since. In 1961 he was designated as a full professor of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics and five years later appointed a Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics, which title he held up to the year of 1976, when the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy was created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Chomsky received a position of an Institute Professor. He has also lectured for and received many honorary degrees from a number of universities around the world.
Apart from linguistics, Noam Chomsky has been active in politics for a considerable amount of time. At the age of ten Chomsky wrote his first article concerning the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. In the year of 1969 he published his first politics-oriented book entitled “American Power and the New Mandarins”, in which he raised an objection against the American war in Vietnam. By the 1980s Chomsky had become not only the most reputable American linguist but also the most prominent left-wing critic of both American foreign policy as well as media coverage of political issues. In 1992 he was one of the most frequently cited people in the world.
Chomsky has also revolutionized the field of psychology with his review of B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior”, in which he questioned the behaviorists’ approach to the study of behavior and language. In Chomsky’s view (1959) language is not solely a set of habits developed in the process of conditioning but an innate predisposition of all human kind. His naturalistic approach to the study of language contributed to a shift of thought in the area of philosophy of language and mind. He was first to see the connection and dependency between the structure of language and the structure of human mind.
Noam Chomsky is a widely distinguished figure in the field of linguistics, philosophy, and politics. He is also a prolific author in the previously-mentioned disciplines. This paper, however, will deal exclusively with Chomsky the linguist and, in particular, his Transformational-Generative Grammar theory, which revolutionized the scientific study of language.


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