Noam Chomsky

(Philadelphia, USA, 1928)

Linguist, philosopher and sociopolitical activist, characterized by a strong criticism of contemporary capitalism and the foreign policy of the United States. He received his doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, and carried out most of his doctoral research at Harvard University. He joined the teaching staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in 1961. Between 1966 and 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics and in 1976 he was named Institute Professor, since 2002 he has been Professor Emeritus at MIT and in 2017 he was appointed Agnese Nelms Haury Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Its scientific program covers theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophies of language and mind and cognitive psychology, giving a radical change to the study of language. Chomsky developed a theory of language embedded in the cognitive system of human beings, introducing the concept of generative grammar: the idea that the grammatical rules of all languages are generated by a universal grammar that the human brain innately possesses. He is the author of seminal publications such as Logical structure of linguistic theory, Syntactic structures, Aspects of the theory of syntax and Language and understanding.