Noam Chomsky

CHOMSKY, Noam (1928- ), American linguist, educator, and political activist, regarded as the founder of transformational-generative grammar, a system that revolutionized linguistics. Born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and became known as a teacher and writer and was an articulate opponent of the Vietnam War.

Chomsky believes that language is the result of an innate human faculty. His analyses of language start with basic sentences, from which are developed an endless variety of syntactic combinations by means of a set of rules that he formulates. At the end of a chain of syntactic rules are phonological rules governing pronunciation. His major linguistic works are Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968; with Morris Halle, 1923- ), Language and Mind (1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and Reflections on Language (both 1975). Language and Responsibility (1979) links language and politics; Chomsky's political writings include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983).

Introduction
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Noam Chomsky and George A. Miller. Finite state languages. Information and Control, 1(2):91-112, May 1958.
Noam Chomsky. On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control, 2(2):137-167, June 1959.
Noam Chomsky. A note on phrase structure grammars. Information and Control, 2(4):393-395, December 1959.