Saturday, February 26, 2011

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (1928- ), known as Noam Chomsky, is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political activist. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics, and a major figure of analytic philosophy.

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics[1] is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant 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.

In linguistics[1], a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

In linguistics, the Minimalist Program (MP) is a mode of inquiry, characterized by the flexibility of the multiple directions that its minimalism enables. Ultimately, the MP provides a conceptual framework used to guide the development of grammatical theory. Minimalist questions,that yield answers which can be framed in any theory. Of all these questions, the one that plays the most crucial role is this: why language has the properties it has.

[1]Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: (1)the study of language form, (2)of language meaning, and (3)of language in context.

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