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Childhood
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Yearly Years: 1928-1945
Noam Chomsky's parents, Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were both Russian Jews and also teachers and linguists. His father was the author of a book on the grammatic structure of Hebrew and the faculty president of Gratz College for eight years. Noam grew up in an intellectual atmosphere, and several members of the extended family had ties to labor or communist movements. His first article was about the fall of Barcelona, during the Spanish Civil War. (Barsky, 9-17.) -
Young Chomsky
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University: 1945–1955
Chomsky attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. Finding his college experience similar to that of his high school. He recieved his Ph.D. in 1955 and joined the faculty of MIT the same year. In his doctoral thesis and his first publications, Chomsky began the creation of a body of work that would transform the study of linguistics. -
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Early career:1955-1966
Chomsky decided that human language ability must have a genetic basis. Chomsky developed the idea of a Universal Grammar, a set of principles that describe the formulation of all human languages. With a more or less instinctive knowledge of this Universal Grammar an infant could construct the rules for a language using the random pieces it was exposed to Other avenues of Chomsky's work led to the creation of an entirely new field of linguistic research known as transformational grammar. ,,,,,,,, -
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Anti-war activism and dissent:1967-1975
Around 1961, Noam Chomsky began to speak and write on political topics, finding an audience among the student-protest movement.
In 1967, he joined the March on the Pentagon and wound up breifly sharing a jail cell with author Norman Mailer. Despite marginalization by the mainstream press, his books have gained considerable recognition and he has been recognized as one of the most outspoken critics of U.S. foriegn policy. -
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Critique of propaganda and international affairs: 1981-2001
Manufacturing Consent(1988), and Secrets, Lies and Democracy(1994), Chomsky addresses such subjects as American involvement in Latin America and Indochina, the Cold War, the media's manipulation of the public in respect to these and other issues, and the responsibility of intellectuals to address these problems.
Chomsky helped us understand how language breaks the barrier of the mental world into the physical.
He teaches at MIT, where he holds an endowed chair in linguistics. -
Refrences
Chomsky Biography. (n.d.). Retrieved 29 March 2021, from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/chomsky/chomskybio.html