Noam Chomsky, Life and Work

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist political critic and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) at MIT. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books, and one of the eight most cited source.

Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.  Also he has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media.

Some days ago, April 16, 2013 according to News sources Noam Chomsky criticized Germany of creating a state of economic slave and psychological stress to Greece.

Linguistics

He challenges the Structural Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure with the introduction of Transformational grammar or generative grammar, in which transformation may be understood as relations between sentences, and these may not just manipulate the surface strings, but the concrete syntax tree or parse tree related to them, making of it a tree system.

The two main basic concepts once were deep structure and surface structure in his first work, in more recent Chomsky’s work he introduce two additional levels of representation: Logical form and Phonetic Form, and finally in the 90’s the first two disappear in a work called “Minimalism” and the last two remained as the only levels of representation.

Perhaps his most influential contribution is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language.

Chomsky also introduced two central ideas to the grammatical theories:

1.    Competence and performance

2.    A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the infinite set of grammatical sentences in that language. Explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind.

The Chomsky hierarchy

It consists of four levels:

1.    Type-0 grammars, unrestricted grammars, include all grammars.

2.    Type-1 grammars, generate context-sensitive languages

3.    Type-2 grammars, generate context-free languages

4.    Type-3 grammars, generate the regular languages

Each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before, some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar than modeling others.

Politics

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism", and he has praised libertarian socialism. His political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist" or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states.

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use.

Media

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media, its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests. Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population.

Psychology

For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

Noam Chomsky Style aka MIT Gangnam Style

Chomsky Style word search game » online word search