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On December 7, 1928, Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were both well-known experts in Hebrew studies. -
He enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, graduating in 1949 with a bachelor's in linguistics, the following year with a master's, and then in 1955 with a doctorate.
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Chomsky wed Carol Schatz, an expert in education whom he had known since childhood, in 1949. Up until her death from cancer in 2008, their relationship lasted 59 years. Together, they had three kids. -
Chomsky was asked to join the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. He spent fifty years working in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at the university before stepping down from active teaching in 2005.
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Chomsky's 1957 book "Syntactic Structures" was influenced by behaviorist theories, such as those of B. F. Skinner, which argued that young children had a blank mind and learned language through learning and mimicking. -
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Chomsky's writings on linguistics include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986).