Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, and political commentator. He developed transformational-generative grammar and became known for critiques of U.S. foreign policy and mass media.

Zellig Harris: An American linguist whose distributional methods and mentorship helped shape early generative linguistics. Chomsky studied with Harris and developed a theory that departed sharply from Harris’s methods.
Generative grammar: A framework that describes language with rules capable of generating a potentially unlimited set of sentences. Chomsky’s linguistic theories belong to this broader approach to grammar.
Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book introducing a formal approach to generative syntax. This concise work brought his transformational analysis of grammar to wider attention.
B. F. Skinner: An American psychologist and behaviorist who explained behavior through environmental conditioning. Chomsky’s 1959 review challenged Skinner’s behaviorist account of language learning.
Cognitive revolution: A mid-twentieth-century shift toward studying internal mental processes as scientific explanations of behavior. Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism helped spur this change in psychology and linguistics.
Morris Halle: A linguist who collaborated with Chomsky on generative phonology and co-founded MIT’s Linguistics Department. Their work extended generative methods from syntax into the sound structure of language.
Transformational grammar: A theory of grammar in which transformations relate underlying structures to the forms of sentences. It names the grammatical framework Chomsky developed in his early work.
The Sound Pattern of English: A 1968 book by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle on generative phonology. It applies generative reasoning to how linguistic sound patterns are represented.
Verbal Behavior: B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book applying behaviorist principles to language. Chomsky’s review of this book became a landmark criticism of behaviorist linguistics.
Generative linguistics: A family of linguistic theories that model language with explicit systems of rules or principles. Chomsky’s work established the approach as a major research program.

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