Noam Chomsky, in full Avram Noam Chomsky (b. Dec. 7, 1928, Philadelphia, U.S.

),
American theoretical linguist whose work from the 1950s revolutionized the field of
linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity.
Through his contributions to linguistics and related fields, including cognitive psychology and
the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky helped to initiate and sustain what came to
be known as the “cognitive revolution.” Chomsky also gained a worldwide following as a
political dissident for his analyses of the pernicious influence of economic elites on U.S.
domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture.

Life and basic ideas

Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary
school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-
directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper
lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe.
His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later
as the basis of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a
study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson.

When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where
he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-
class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that
would underlie his political views throughout his life: that all people are capable of
comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis;
that all people need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and from
associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that
cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate. According to Chomsky’s
anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in
which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others
and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them.

In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to
interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political
interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the
linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose
political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris
and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan
Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In
his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at
Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s
approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the
philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel.

Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate) and
that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli,
Chomsky held 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. Whereas Harris thought
of the study of language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the
discovery, through the application of formal systems, of the innate principles that make
possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordinary use of language by
children and adults alike. And whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behaviour is regular
and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky argued
that it is incited by social context and discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by
a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or “creative.” It is for this reason that
Chomsky believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-fledged science of linguistic
behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes, according
to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a causal one.

Harris ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky would not
accept his behaviourism—denounced it. Their reactions, with some variations, were shared by
a large majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Although some linguists and
psychologists eventually came to accept Chomsky’s basic assumptions regarding language
and the mind, most philosophers continued to resist them.

Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after
submitting one of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956 he
was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to a teaching position that
required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly
skeptical of its prospects for success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the
project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book
Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT
undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a
new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars,
including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.

Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American
behaviourism, came to be regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviourist accounts of
language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of
language and mind gained wider acceptance within linguistics, though there were many
theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in
1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute
Professor in 1976. He retired as professor emeritus in 2002.

Linguistics
“Plato’s problem”

A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially depends

on an innate system of concept generation and combination. According to Chomsky, children
display “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of complexes of concepts—
from virtually their first words. With language, they bring to bear thousands of rich and
articulate concepts when they play, invent, and speak to and understand each other. They
seem to know much more than they have been taught—or even could be taught. Such
knowledge, therefore, must be innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say
that the child is conscious of it or even that it exists, fully formed, at birth. It is only to say
that it is produced by the child’s system of concept generation and combination, in accordance
with the system’s courses of biological and physical development, upon their exposure to
certain kinds of environmental input.

It has frequently been observed that children acquire both concepts and language with
amazing facility and speed, despite the paucity or even absence of meaningful evidence and
instruction in their early years. The inference to the conclusion that much of what they acquire
must be innate is known as the argument from the “poverty of the stimulus.” Specifying
precisely what children acquire and how they acquire it are aspects of what Chomsky called in
LSLT the “fundamental problem” of linguistics. In later work he referred to this as “Plato’s
problem,” a reference to Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how it is
possible for an uneducated child to solve geometrical problems with appropriate prompting
but without any specific training or background in mathematics. Unlike Plato, however,
Chomsky held that solving Plato’s problem is a task for natural science, specifically cognitive
science and linguistics.

Principles and parameters

Chomsky’s early attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were presented in
the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent “extended
standard theory,” which was developed and revised through the late 1970s. These theories
proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar
(a theory of linguistic data), a method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to
which the child is exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed
grammars. The child’s mind constructs a number of possible grammars that are consistent
with the linguistic data and then selects the grammar with the fewest rules or primitives.
Although ingenious, this approach was cumbersome in comparison with later theories, in part
because it was not clear exactly what procedures would have to be involved in the
construction and evaluation of grammars.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Chomsky and others developed a better solution using a
theoretical framework known as “principles and parameters” (P&P), which Chomksy
introduced in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and elaborated in Knowledge of
Language (1986). Principles are linguistic universals, or structural features that are common
to all natural languages; hence, they are part of the child’s native endowment. Parameters,
also native (though not necessarily specific to language, perhaps figuring elsewhere too), are
options that allow for variation in linguistic structure. The P&P approach assumed that these
options are readily set upon the child’s exposure to a minimal amount of linguistic data, a
hypothesis that has been supported by empirical evidence. One proposed principle, for
example, is that phrase structure must consist of a head, such as a noun or a verb, and a
complement, which can be a phrase of any form. The order of head and complement,
however, is not fixed: languages may have a head-initial structure, as in the English verb
phrase (VP) “wash the clothes,” or a “head-final” structure, as in the corresponding Japanese
VP “the clothes wash.” Thus, one parameter that is set through the child’s exposure to
linguistic data is “head-initial/head-final.” The setting of what was thought, during the early
development of P&P, to be a small number of parametric options within the constraints
provided by a sufficiently rich set of linguistic principles would, according to this approach,
yield a grammar of the specific language to which the child is exposed. Later the introduction
of “microparameters” and certain nonlinguistic constraints on development complicated this
simple story, but the basic P&P approach remained in place, offering what appears to be the
best solution to Plato’s problem yet proposed.
The phonological, or sound-yielding, features of languages are also parameterized, according
to the P&P approach. They are usually set early in development—apparently within a few
days—and they must be set before the child becomes too old if he is to be able to pronounce
the language without an accent. This time limit on phonological parameter setting would
explain why second-language learners rarely, if ever, sound like native speakers. In contrast,
young children exposed to any number of additional languages before the time limit is
reached have no trouble producing the relevant sounds.

In contrast to the syntactic and phonological features of language, the basic features out of
which lexically expressed concepts (and larger units of linguistic meaning) are constructed do
not appear to be parameterized: different natural languages seem to rely on the same set. Even
if semantic features were parameterized, however, a set of features detailed enough to provide
(in principle) for hundreds of thousands of root, or basic, concepts would have to be a part of
the child’s innate, specifically linguistic endowment—what Chomsky calls Universal
Grammar, or UG—or of his nonlinguistic endowment—the innate controls on growth,
development, and the final states of other systems in the mind or brain. This is indicated, as
noted above, by the extraordinary rate at which children acquire lexical concepts (about one
per waking hour between the ages of two and eight) and the rich knowledge that each concept
and its verbal, nominal, adverbial, and other variants provide. No training or conscious
intervention plays a role; lexical acquisition seems to be as automatic as parameter setting.

Of course, people differ in the words contained in their vocabularies and in the particular
sounds they happen to associate with different concepts. Early in the 20th century, the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that there is nothing natural or necessary about the
specific sounds with which a concept may be associated in a given language. According to
Chomsky, this “Saussurean arbitrariness” is of no interest to the natural scientist of language,
because sound-concept associations in this sense are not a part of UG or of other nonlinguistic
systems that contribute to concept (and sound) development.

A developed theory of UG and of relevant nonlinguistic systems would in principle account

for all possible linguistic sounds and all possible lexical concepts and linguistic meanings, for
it would contain all possible phonological and semantic features and all the rules and
constraints for combining phonological and semantic features into words and for combining
words into a potentially infinite number of phrases and sentences. Of course, such a complete
theory may never be fully achieved, but in this respect linguistics is no worse off than physics,
chemistry, or any other science. They too are incomplete.

It is important to notice that the semantic features that constitute lexical concepts, and the
rules and constraints governing their combination, seem to be virtually designed for use by
human beings—i.e., designed to serve human interests and to solve human problems. For
example, concepts such as “give” and “village” have features that reflect human actions and
interests: transfer of ownership (and much more) is part of the meaning of give, and polity
(both abstract and concrete) is part of the meaning of village. Linguists and philosophers
sympathetic to empiricism will object that these features are created when a community
“invents” a language to do the jobs it needs to do—no wonder, then, that linguistic meanings
reflect human interests and problems. The rationalist, in contrast, argues that humans could
not even conceive of these interests and problems unless the necessary conceptual machinery
were available beforehand. In Chomsky’s view, the speed and facility with which children
learn “give” and “village” and many thousands of other concepts show that the empiricist
approach is incorrect—though it may be correct in the case of scientific concepts, such as
“muon,” which apparently are not innate and do not reflect human concerns.

The overall architecture of the language faculty also helps to explain how conceptual and
linguistic creativity is possible. In the P&P framework in its later “minimalist” forms (see
below Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language), the language faculty has
“interfaces” that allow it to communicate with other parts of the mind. The information it
provides through “sensorimotor” interfaces enables humans to produce and perceive speech
and sign language, and the information it provides through “conceptual-intentional” interfaces
enables humans to perform numerous cognitive tasks, ranging from categorization (“that’s a
lynx”) to understanding and producing stories and poetry.

Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language

Chomsky’s theories of grammar and language are often referred to as “generative,”

“transformational,” or “transformational-generative.” In a mathematical sense, “generative”
simply means “formally explicit.” In the case of language, however, the meaning of the term
typically also includes the notion of “productivity”—i.e., the capacity to produce an infinite
number of grammatical phrases and sentences using only finite means (e.g., a finite number of
principles and parameters and a finite vocabulary). In order for a theory of language to be
productive in this sense, at least some of its principles or rules must be recursive. A rule or
series of rules is recursive if it is such that it can be applied to its own output an indefinite
number of times, yielding a total output that is potentially infinite. A simple example of a
recursive rule is the successor function in mathematics, which takes a number as input and
yields that number plus 1 as output. If one were to start at 0 and apply the successor function
indefinitely, the result would be the infinite set of natural numbers. In grammars of natural
languages, recursion appears in various forms, including in rules that allow for concatenation,
relativization, and complementization, among other operations.

Chomsky’s theories are “transformational” in the sense that they account for the syntactic and
semantic properties of sentences by means of modifications of the structure of a phrase in the
course of its generation. The standard theory of Syntactic Structures and especially of Aspects
of the Theory of Syntax employed a phrase-structure grammar—a grammar in which the
syntactic elements of a language are defined by means of rewrite rules that specify their
smaller constituents (e.g., “S → NP + VP,” or “a sentence may be rewritten as a noun phrase
and a verb phrase”)—a large number of “obligatory” and “optional” transformations, and two
levels of structure: a “deep structure,” where semantic interpretation takes place, and a
“surface structure,” where phonetic interpretation takes place. These early grammars were
difficult to contrive, and their complexity and language-specificity made it very difficult to
see how they could constitute a solution to Plato’s problem.

In Chomsky’s later theories, deep structure ceased to be the locus of semantic interpretation.
Phrase-structure grammars too were virtually eliminated by the end of the 1970s; the task they
performed was taken over by the operation of “projecting” individual lexical items and their
properties into more complex structures by means of “X-bar theory.” Transformations during
this transitional period were reduced to a single operation, “Move α” (“Move alpha”), which
amounted to “move any element in a derivation anywhere”—albeit within a system of robust
constraints. Following the introduction of the “minimalist program” (MP) in the early 1990s,
deep structure (and surface structure) disappeared altogether. Move α, and thus modification
of structure from one derivational step to another, was replaced by “Move” and later by
“internal Merge,” a variant of “external Merge,” itself a crucial basic operation that takes two
elements (such as words) and makes of them a set. In the early 21st century, internal and
external Merge, along with parameters and microparameters, remained at the core of
Chomsky’s efforts to construct grammars.

Throughout the development of these approaches to the science of language, there were
continual improvements in simplicity and formal elegance in the theories on offer; the early
phrase-structure components, transformational components, and deep and surface structures
were all eliminated, replaced by much simpler systems. Indeed, an MP grammar for a specific
language could in principle consist entirely of Merge (internal and external) together with
some parametric settings. MP aims to achieve both of the major original goals that Chomsky
set for a theory of language in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: that it be descriptively
adequate, in the sense that the grammars it provides generate all and only the grammatical
expressions of the language in question, and that it be explanatorily adequate, in the sense that
it provides a descriptively adequate grammar for any natural language as represented in the
mind of a given individual. MP grammars thus provide a solution to Plato’s problem,
explaining how any individual readily acquires what Chomsky calls an “I-language”—“I” for
internal, individual, and intensional (that is, described by a grammar). But they also speak to
other desiderata of a natural science: they are much simpler, and they are much more easily
accommodated to another science, namely biology.

Philosophy of mind and human nature

Human conceptual and linguistic creativity involves several mental faculties and entails the
existence of some kind of mental organization. It depends on perceptual-articulatory systems
and conceptual-intentional systems, of course, but on many others too, such as vision.
According to Chomsky, the mind comprises an extensive cluster of innate “modules,” one of
which is language. Each module operates automatically, independently of individual control,
on the basis of a distinct, domain-specific set of rules that take determinate inputs from some
modules and yield determinate outputs for others. In earlier work these operations were called
“derivations”; more recently they have been called “computations.” The various modules
interact in complex ways to yield perception, thought, and a large number of other cognitive
products.

The language module seems to play a role in coordinating the products of other modules. The
generative—specifically, recursive—properties of language enable humans to combine
arbritary concepts together in indefinitely many ways, thereby making the range of human
thought virtually unlimited. When concepts are paired with sounds in lexical items (words),
humans can say virtually anything and cooperate and make plans with each other. The fact
that the language faculty yields this kind of flexibility suggests that the emergence of
language in human evolutionary history coincided with the appearance of other cognitive
capacities based on recursion, including quantification.

In a 2002 article, The Language Faculty, Chomsky and his coauthors Marc Hauser and W.
Tecumseh Fitch divided the language faculty in a way that reflected what had been
Chomsky’s earlier distinction between competence and performance. The faculty of language
in the “narrow” sense (FLN) amounts to the recursive computational system alone, whereas
the faculty in the broad sense (FLB) includes perceptual-articulatory systems (for sound and
sign) and conceptual-intentional systems (for meaning). These are the systems with which the
computational system interacts at its interfaces. Regarding evolution, the authors point out
that, although there are homologues and analogs in other species for the perceptual-
articulatory and conceptual-intentional systems, there are none for the computational system,
or FLN. Conceivably, some cognitive systems of animals, such as the navigational systems of
birds, might involve recursion, but there is no computational system comparable to FLN, in
particular none that links sound and meaning and yields unbounded sentential “output.” FLN
is arguably what makes human beings cognitively distinct from other creatures.

As suggested earlier, UG, or the language faculty narrowly understood (FLN), may consist
entirely of Merge and perhaps some parameters specific to language. This raises the question
of what the biological basis of FLN must be. What distinctive fact of human biology, or the
human genome, makes FLN unique to humans? In a 2005 article, Three Factors in Language
Design, Chomsky pointed out that there is more to organic development and growth than
biological (genomic) specification and environmental input. A third factor is general
conditions on growth resulting from restrictions on possible physical structures and
restrictions on data analysis, including those that might figure in computational systems (such
as language). For example, a bee’s genome does not have to direct it to build hives in a
hexagonal lattice. The lattice is a requirement imposed by physics, since this structure is the
most stable and efficient of the relevant sort. Analogous points can be made about the growth,
structure, and operation of the human brain. If the parameters of UG are not specified by the
language-specific parts of the human genome but are instead the result of third factors, the
only language-specific information that the genome would need to carry is an instruction set
for producing a single principle, Merge (which takes external and internal forms). And if this
is the case, then the appearance of language could have been brought about by a single genetic
mutation in a single individual, so long as that mutation were transmissible to progeny.
Obviously, the relevant genes would provide great advantages to any human who possessed
them. A saltational account such as this has some evidence behind it: 50,000 to 100,000 years
ago, humans began to observe the heavens, to draw and paint, to wonder, and to develop
explanations of natural phenomena—and the migration from Africa began. Plausibly, the
introduction of the computational system of language led to this remarkable cognitive
awakening.