-
Birth
Born on Dec 7th, 1928 in Philadelphia, PA. -
Period: to
Attended the University of Pennsylvania
Noam started attending the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 16. Noam graduated with his PhD in linguistics in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was one chapter of his thesis of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. -
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT)
For Noam’s master thesis he studied and wrote The logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. In this thesis Noam suggested that, “the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts they are used to express, are innately represented in the human mind and that language learning consists of the unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn from the child’s linguistic environment.” -
Teaching Position at MIT
In 1957 Noam took a teaching job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught linguistics and spent half of his time working on a machine translation project. -
The Language Faculty
In 2002, Noam and his coauthors Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch wrote an article that described two types of language faculty. The two types are a narrow sense and a broad sense. For the narrow sense the language faculty uses the recursive computations system by itself. For the broad sense it includes perceptual-articulatory systems (sound and sign) and conceptual-intentional systems (for meaning). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ORHGa-vQp0 -
Retired
Noam retired as professor emeritus from MIT in 2002.