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Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Chomsky (born into a middle-class, Jewish family) attended an experimental elementary school that had students self-teach their lessons. He took to it well and could often be found writing articles for the school newspaper and travelling by himself to New York for the superior libraries there (McGilvray). -
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Studied at University of Pennsylvania
He started college at age 16, and studied under Zellig Harris for his Bachelor's (1949), Master's (1951), and Doctoral degrees (1955). Harris was one of the founders of structural linguistics in America (McGilvray). -
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Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chomsky is now the Institute Instructor (Askedal 2) -
Published "Syntactic Structures"
Theorized that there is a standard method to sentence structuring in the English language, and that there are "levels" of linguistics that, when stacked in the proper order, create grammatically correct sentences. Essentially, a set of phonemics, morphology, and phrase structure rules build on descriptive tools to create sentences; and the more descriptive grammar used,the higher the linguistic level of the sentence. (Chomsky, "Syntactic") -
Published "The Sound Pattern of English"
Co-written with Morris Halle; "this book redefined the subdisciplines of phonology and morphology" (Askedal 2).
They developed an experiment where subjects were asked to pronounce uncommon words, and hypothesized that groups of native speakers share an internalized set of rules for pronunciation, especially present with unknown words. Around 81% of subjects from the same group were in agreement with the pronunciation and stress point of the words. -
Published "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory"
Reprint of his 1955 dissertation. Introduced theory of "generative grammar" (there is an apparent set of rules used to create an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences in a language).
Shared views on early language: children are born with the basics of grammar, and structure them based on social context, not as a fixed reaction to a fixed stimulus.
VIDEO on generative grammar
Quick VIDEO
