X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018

Avram Noam Chomsky born December 7, (1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics," Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona.

Born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of 16 he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows, where he developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, in 1957 emerging as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which remodeled the scientific study of language, while from 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky attracted widespread public attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Additionally, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech – including for Holocaust deniers – generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror and supporting the Occupy movement.

Personal life

Chomsky endeavors to keep his family life, linguistic scholarship, and political activism strictly separate from one another, calling himself "scrupulous at keeping my politics out of the classroom".An intensely private person, he is uninterested in appearances and the fame that his work has brought him. McGilvray suggested that Chomsky was never motivated by a desire for fame, but that he was impelled to tell what he perceived as the truth and a desire to aid others in doing so. He also has little interest in modern art and music. He reads four or five newspapers daily; in the U.S., he subscribes to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. He acknowledges that his income and the financial security that it accords him means that he lives a privileged life compared to the majority of the world's population. He characterizes himself as a "worker", albeit one who uses his intellect as his employable skill.

Despite having been raised Jewish, Chomsky is currently non-religious, although he has expressed approval of forms of religion such as liberation theology. He is known for his "dry, laconic wit", and for the use of irony in his writings, and has attracted controversy for labeling established political and academic figures with terms like "corrupt", "fascist", and "fraudulent". Chomsky's colleague Steven Pinker has said that he "portrays people who disagree with him as stupid or evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric", and that this contributes to the extreme reactions that he generates from his critics. Chomsky avoids attending academic conferences, including left-oriented ones such as the Socialist Scholars Conference, preferring to speak to activist groups or hold university seminars for mass audiences.

Chomsky was married to Carol Doris Schatz (Chomsky) from 1949 until her death in 2008. They had three children together: Aviva (1957), Diane (1960), and Harry (1967). In 2014, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman.

Linguistic theory

Within the field of linguistics, McGilvray credits Chomsky with inaugurating the "cognitive revolution". McGilvray also credits him with establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics that was dominant during the mid-20th century. As such, some have called him "the father of modern linguistics".

The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is rooted in biolinguistics, holding that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted. He therefore argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position, Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner which views the mind as a tabula rasa ("blank slate") and thus treats language as learned behavior. Accordingly, he argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and is unlike modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism", and is contrasted with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language, which is consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism".

Universal grammar

Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. Chomsky based his argument on observations about human language acquisition, noting that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (see: "poverty of the stimulus" argument). For example, although children are exposed to only a finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered. To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data (PLD) must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks as the language acquisition device (LAD), and he suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to determine what the LAD is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints constitute "universal grammar".

Transformational generative grammar

Beginning with his Syntactic Structures (1957), a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955), Chomsky challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.

Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures. Surface structure 'faces out' and is represented by spoken utterances, while deep structure 'faces inward' and expresses the underlying relations between words and conceptual meaning. Transformational grammar is a generative grammar (which dictates that the syntax, or word order, of surface structures adheres to certain principles and parameters) that consists of a limited series of rules, expressed in mathematical notation, which transform deep structures into well-formed surface structures. The transformational grammar thus relates meaning and sound.

Chomsky hierarchy

The Chomsky hierarchy, sometimes referred to as the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. The hierarchy imposes a logical structure across different language classes and provides a basis for understanding the relationship between grammars (devices that enumerate the valid sentences within languages). In order of increasing expressive power it includes regular (or Type-3) grammars, context-free (or Type-2) grammars, context-sensitive (or Type-1) grammars, and recursively enumerable (or Type-0) grammars. Each class is a strict subset of the class above it, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages (infinite sets of strings composed from finite sets of symbols, or alphabets) than the one below. In addition to being important in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy is also relevant in theoretical computer science, especially in programming language theory, compiler construction, and automata theory.

Minimalist program

Since the 1990s, much of Chomsky's research has focused on what he calls the Minimalist Program (MP), in which he departs from much of his past research and instead attempts to simplify language into a system that relates meaning and sound using the minimum possible faculties that could be expected, given certain external conditions that are imposed on us independently. Chomsky dispenses with concepts such as 'deep structure' and 'surface structure' and instead places emphasis on the plasticity of the brain's neural circuits, along with which comes an infinite number of concepts, or 'Logical Forms'. When exposed to linguistic data, the brain of a hearer-speaker then proceeds to associate sound and meaning, and the rules of grammar that we observe are in fact only the consequences, or side effects, of the way that language works. Thus, while much of Chomsky's prior research has focused on the rules of language, he now focuses on the mechanisms that the brain uses to create these rules.

Код для цитирования: Скопировать