AVRAM NOAM CHOMSKY

• Linguistics itself is a discipline of cognitive psychology and strives to understand how language is learned and used by children.

• Psychologist• Linguistic• Political activist

• Was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia

• His parents William and Elsie Chomsky were Hebrew

• His brother David Eli Chomsky 5 years older than him

PROFESSIONAL LIFE

Central High School of Philadelphia

• 1955 he left Harvard and entered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Until now…

• He married Doris Schatz

• They had two daugthers an a son

CONTRIBUTION TO PSYCHOLOGY

• every language had similar parameters that could be manipulated and modified

• Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates

• Contribution to the field of phonology

AWARDS

• benjamin franklin medal on computer and cognitive science

• the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

POPULAR CULTURE

• Michel Foucault• social structures

determine human values, personality, and social problems

• human nature is heavily determined by biology

• Chomsky is

known as a

vigorous

debater:

• William F.

Buckley

• Christopher

Hitchens

• Alan Dershowitz

CONTIBUTIONS TO

LANGUAGE

ACQUISITIONS AND

THEORIES

Linguistic theory

• the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted

• Everybody has the same underlying linguistic structure

Syntactic Structures

• challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.

• Chomsky says that a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances.

Another important contribution

Universal grammar

(lack of LAD)

• LAD ( languaje acquisition device)

• UG (universal grammar)

• the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time

LAD

• The precise form of language must be acquired through exposure to a speech community.

• Words are definitely not inbron, but the capacity to acquire language and use it creatively seems to be inborn.