Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, William Chomsky, was a Hebrew scholar, and the household had a strong interest in Jewish culture and intellectual life. Chomsky showed an early interest in linguistics, exposed from a young age to his father's academic work on medieval Hebrew grammar.

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he came under the influence of linguist Zellig Harris, whose methods shaped Chomsky's early thinking. He completed his doctoral dissertation, later published as The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, at the University of Pennsylvania, and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955, where he spent the great majority of his academic career.

In his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, Chomsky introduced the framework of transformational-generative grammar, proposing that human language is characterized by a set of underlying rules capable of generating an infinite number of grammatical sentences. His 1959 critical review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior challenged behaviorist approaches to language acquisition and contributed to what has been described as the cognitive revolution in psychology and linguistics.

Chomsky argued for the existence of a universal grammar, an innate linguistic capacity shared by all humans, and proposed that language acquisition in children cannot be explained by environmental input alone. These proposals were influential and also contested within the field. His technical linguistic work continued across many subsequent publications and revisions to the framework.

From the late 1960s onward, Chomsky became a prominent public intellectual, publishing extensively on American foreign policy, media, and political economy. Works co-authored with Edward Herman, including Manufacturing Consent (1988), analyzed mechanisms by which mass media, in their account, shape public discourse in ways that serve institutional interests.

Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002 as Institute Professor Emeritus, though he has continued to write and lecture. He holds a position at the University of Arizona. He lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with his wife Valeria Wasserman.