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Born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, PA. He is still currently alive.
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In 1957, while teaching an undergraduate course on language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), came the inspiration for his book, Syntactic Structures. Here he writes about the study of language, and attempts to provide a theory on how language is structured.
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It was thought that language was learned as behavior, that a person was born with a clean slate and learned everything from its parents. Chomsky argued B.F Skinner's Behaviorism theory, and had his own input on how language was determined. He wanted to know the scientific way of how a language was learned.
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Chomsky introduces the difference between competence and performance, that " 'competence' refers to a speaker's knowledge about his or her grammar, whereas 'performance' refers to the way in which the speaker puts that knowledge to use in actually speaking and understanding a language" (Poole, 2005). His whole basis of studying language is that it is competence.
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Chomsky describes 'Plato's Problem' and turns it into his life works in language. Plato's problem, how humans know what they know from what little the world has given them, can be turned into 'poverty of the stimulus', where data is not determined by the knowledge of language acquisition.
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Noam Chomsky is known as the father of linguists. He wanted language to be viewed scientifically, and that language was not only learned, and created the universal grammar to describe it.
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Poole, G. (2005). Noam Chomsky. In S. Chapman, & C. Routledge, Key thinkers in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Edinburg, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.apus.edu.ezproxy1.apus.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/edinburghthinkl/noam_chomsky/0?institutionId=8703