THE BIOGRAPHY OF
Noam Chomsky As seen by ABU R. CHOWDHURY GEORGIANA TACHE
CSCE 619 Prof. Dr. Dasgupta Spring 2015
Noam Chomsky is an eminent American theoretical linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator, social justice activist, andanarchosyndicalist advocate, who radically changed the field of linguisticsby stating that language is a uniquely human, biologically based cognitivecapacity. He suggested that innate traits in the human brain give birth toboth language and grammar. As the most important figure in “cognitiverevolution” and “analytic philosophy”, Chomsky’s wideranging influencealso extends to computer science and mathematics. Sometimes described asthe "father of modern linguistics", Chomsky has spent most of his career atthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currentlyProfessor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been describedas a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the "world's top publicintellectual" in a 2005 poll.
Early life, family and education
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 to a middleclassAshkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia. His father was the UkrainianbornWilliam "Zev" Chomsky, who had come to the USA in 1913, and his motherwas the Lithuanianborn Elsie Simonofsky. William, the father, was veryinvolved in the study of the Hebrew grammar, teaching it in schools andpublishing different papers on it. He also placed a great emphasis oneducating people so that they would be "well integrated, free andindependent in their thinking, and eager to participate in making life moremeaningful and worthwhile for all" [1], a view subsequently adopted by hisson Noam. Noam was the Chomsky family's first child. His younger brother, David EliChomsky, was born five years later. The brothers were raised in a Jewishenvironment, being taught Hebrew and regularly discussing the politicaltheories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the LeftZionist writings which Chomsky later labeled as antizionist. Because of hisJewish heritage, Noam Chomsky faced antisemitism as a child, particularlyfrom the Irish and German communities in Philadelphia.
Chomsky's primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, anindependent institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue theirown interests in a noncompetitive atmosphere. It was here that he wrote hisfirst article, aged 10, on the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelonain the Spanish Civil War. Aged 12, he moved on to secondary education atCentral High School, where he joined various clubs and societies but was
troubled by the hierarchical and regimented method of teaching that theyemployed. From age 13, he started traveling to New York and there hispolitical interests would get shaped. His uncle, living there and owning anewspaper stand, would often join other Jewish leftists to debate the issuesof the day. Whenever visiting his relatives in New York City, Chomsky alsoused to visit leftwing and anarchist bookstores, voraciously reading politicalliterature.
He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he was attractedto the field of linguistics. Although dissatisfied with the strict structure ofthe university, he was encouraged to continue by the Russianborn linguistZellig Harris, who convinced Chomsky to major in the subject. He receivedhis B.A. (1949) and M.A. (1951) in nontraditional modes of study. Chomsky'sBA thesis was titled "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew". He continuedPh.D. at U. Pennsylvania as well as Harvard; his dissertation was expressedlater in the book “Syntactic Structures” (p. 1957). During that time in 1955,he joins MIT as a professor in department of Linguistics & Philosophy. Hisfirst work on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, is a book that radicallyopposed the dominant HarrisBloomfield trend in the field. The response toChomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proveddivisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. Linguist JohnLyons later asserted that it "revolutionized the scientific study of language."In 1959 he attracted further attention for his review of B.F. Skinner's 1957book Verbal Behavior in the journal Language, in which he argued thatSkinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics.
Chomsky was a family oriented person from early age whether it was withhis parents or with his own family. He entered a romantic relationship withCarol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since they were very young. Theywere married in 1949 and remained together until her death in 2008. Thecouple raised three children and even though Chomsky got more and moreinvolved in politics in years to come, he was known as a good father andhusband, all his life. His debate quality was well known and the politicalactivism made him famous for a number of times. His research is honored byuniversities from Calcutta to Chicago. He got honorary degrees from morethan forty colleges.
Biographer Robert F. Barsky talked about the passion of Chomsky asfollows: "What motivated his [political] interests? A powerful curiosity,exposure to divergent opinions, and an unorthodox education have all beengiven as answers to this question. He was clearly struck by the obvious
contradictions between his own readings and mainstream press reports. Themeasurement of the distance between the realities presented by these twosources, and the evaluation of why such a gap exists, remained a passion forChomsky." [1]There is no doubt that his family and education shaped him what he hasbecome, a symbol of knowledge and intellect.
Language in his life
Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was a"taboo" in his family to speak it. Unlike his father, his mother Elsie spoke"ordinary New York English". He learned Classical Hebrew as a boy, hisM.A. thesis was "A Generative phonology of Modern Hebrew”. He hadstudents from a number of countries, who had written on other languagessuch as Japanese, Icelandic, Italian, and Hungarian.
Even in 1945 Chomsky embarked on a general program of study at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, where his primary interest was in learningArabic. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teachingHebrew. In one interview, Prof. Chomsky mentions having taught courses in'Scientific French' and 'Scientific German' at MIT in the 1950s, whenfamiliarity with these languages was considered useful for students in thesciences and engineering.
There are many very legitimate and wellrespected linguists who only makeresearch for one language (Noam Chomsky being one of them). Many criticsclaim that he was more inclined to English and other European languagesthan Sanskrit or any Asian or African languages. He had also never hadmuch interest in Modern art and Music where many times a language doespass through generations and evolve. He might have improved his theories ifhe had taken these in consideration. It is still a myth how many languageshe actually knew, but despite this, his works massively influenced the worldof languages.
Contributions and Achievements
Noam Chomsky became a member of the faculty of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and performed his services as a visiting professor.Influenced by the ideas of his mentor, Zellig Harris, Chomsky published hisfamous work, “Syntactic Structures” in 1957. During that era, concepts
regarding the origin of language were inspired by behaviorist ideas, forinstance those of renowned Swedish psychologist B. F. Skinner, whoadvocated that newborn babies had a blank mind (tabula rasa) and thatchildren acquired language by means of learning and mimicry.Chomsky rejected that belief and argued that human beings were in factborn with the innate ability to realize the generative grammars thatconstitute every human language. Children make use of this innate ability tolearn the languages that they are exposed to. Furthermore, he believed thatthe basics concepts of language were innate in every human mind and onlyinfluenced by one's syntactical environment.He declared: “Languages are innate and that the differences we see are onlydue to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain whychildren are able to learn different languages more easily than adults”.
Chomsky established his linguistic theory in 1965 with “Aspects of theTheory of Syntax”, and in 1975, with “The Logical Structure of LinguisticTheory”. Later works in cognitive science supported his claims. The influenceof Chomsky on linguistics is similar to that of Charles Darwin on evolutionand biology. His ideas have significant logical implications for varioussubjects of psychology, and also extends to cognitive science, anthropology,sociology and neurology.
The context of linguistics
Chomsky's contributions to theoretical linguistics is highly influential forany linguist who wants to understand the current paradigms. Every “other”school that occurs has to define its position towards Chomsky's theories.
His first book, “Syntactic Structures” doesn't move too far away from theexisting framework, being in accordance to the “Bloomfieldian” schooldominating at that time. He formalized various systems of generativegrammar. The concept of Generative grammar is a research paradigminitiated by Chomsky, today regarded as a linguistic theory which considersgrammar as a system of rules generating exactly the combinations of wordswhich form grammatical sentences in a given language. Generativegrammar is mostly preoccupied with the study of syntax, but also withmorphology and phonology. Chomsky believed that many properties of agenerative grammar come from a universal grammar innate to human brain,and not because they are learned. In his view, the first such generativegrammar in a modern sense was “Panini’s grammar”, composed in the 6th
century BC in India. After 1950, many approaches of the generative
grammar occurred and also, the Chomsky hierarchy brought new ways ofcomparing and describing them.Along with the Generative grammar, Chomsky also forwarded an argumentthat the behaviorist explanations of human behavior are inadequate, thusfueling the “cognitive revolution” that took place in the 1960s and gave birthto cognitive science.
The simplest grammars capable of generating an infinite set of sentenceswith a finite vocabulary and a finite set of possibly recursive rules are calledby Chomsky finitestate grammars. The modeling of such grammars isborrowed from the automata theory which had just emerged in computerscience and which he drove one step further. Chomsky proved that theframework of finitestate grammar is insufficient to describe certainsentences in English language because of the possible dependencies betweennonadjacent words, themselves separated by structures with the sameproperties, called “mirrorimage” properties.
The second model Chomsky proposed is called phrase structure grammar,with a more satisfactory application. This new grammar is powerful and ableto describe the whole finitestate grammar, as well as to address theshortages it has. It makes use of labels and tree diagrams to express thesyntactic value. Although Chomsky does not prove that there are sentencesthat cannot be generated with the current model, he claims that somesentences can be only “clumsily” described in this manner.
The third model Chomsky created is called the transformational grammar,with considerably extended rules generating much more possible output asbefore. In contrast to the previous models, the rules can be contextsensitive.A Transformational grammar is a generative grammar, especially from anatural language, that involves the use of defined operations(“transformations”) to produce new sentences from existing ones. Today'sresearch is inspired from Chomsky's Minimalist program. This system oftransformational grammar brought a touch of mathematical description forthe language. The mathematical rigor and precision of formulatingproperties was the best contribution he had to linguistics.
After 20 years of publishing “The syntactic structures”, Chomsky's theorieswere still a matter of controversy among linguists, some of them adoptingalternative Chomskyan and postChomskyan versions of transformationalgrammar.
The Chomsky's known works in the linguistics field influenced the area sogreatly, that today we can speak of three phases of language theory, that are:the combinatoric, the cognitive and the minimalist – “inspired” from moredeveloped sciences: engineering, biology and physics respectively. Chomsky'swritings can be mapped to these periods as: “Syntactic Structures” (1957) forcombinatoric, “Aspects of a Theory of Syntax” and “Lectures on governmentand binding” for cognitive, and “The minimalist program” corresponding tothe last phase.
The combinatoric stage states that “The fundamental aim of linguisticanalysis of language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which arethe sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are notsentences of L. The grammar of L will thus be a device that generates all ofthe grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones” (1957).Thus, all language sentences belong to one of two infinite sets: either wellformed or ill formed. A grammarian should find rules that will generate allthe wellformed sentences without any of the illformed ones. It is therefore acomputational problem, also called a combinatoric problem. This first stagesucceeded in developing suitable formal tools for the study of naturallanguage grammars.
The cognitive era has two parts: an early one and a late one. In “Aspects of aTheory of Syntax”, Chomsky emphasizes the question on how young childrenacquire a language and divides the grammar into descriptively adequate andexplanatory adequate. The era mainly focused on how they go from primarylinguistic data (PLD), consisting of wellformed short sentences, to obtaininga grammar for the language that they can use for generating new sentences– and that must have a biological underline. In “Syntactic Structures”,Chomsky attempted to develop grammars with combinatoric properties,whereas in “Aspects of a Theory of Syntax”, the focus shifted more into thecognitive area and the way native people interiorize rules.
The minimalist era started in early 1990s after Chomsky's paper publication,and it is attempting to answer the central question “why a language has theproperties it has”. Its main idea is that universal grammar has a perfectdesign “in the sense that it contains only what is necessary to meet ourconceptual and physical needs” [2].
In “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” as well as in “Cartesian linguistics”and “Language and Mind”, Chomsky started to consider linguistics inrelation to cognitive psychology and philosophy, all because of the aspect of
creativity – the fact that children are able to understand and produce a largenumber of utterances that they have never met before.
Connection with computer science
Around 1950s, a new idea emerged in the realm of computing: how tocompose computer programs without having to deal with more complicatedaspects pertaining to the machine architecture. It was the time for creatingformal (programming) language definitions that will be closer to humannatural understanding rather than to machine specification. This problemwas split into two: first, to design a mathematical language for expressing analgorithm, and second – to translate these programs into machine code. Thefirst problem was resolved with the emergence of a new discipline, calleddesign of computer programs, and the second – by the emergence of compilerdesign.
The mathematical highlevel programming language envisioned wasmaterialized with the advent of Fortran, from 1954, quickly adopted by thescientific community. Later on, the business computing people would also geta language adapted to their needs, named Cobol. Within this context, there was not much awareness at that time that a PLdescription can be, itself, a scientific problem. It all changed in Europe withadvancing the idea of an “unified programming language”. In consequence,Algol and its versions appeared as languages to describe algorithms inofficial publications. The language of Algol made use of entities called blocks encapsulatedbetween begin and end keywords. Inside a block, there were typed variablesand procedures as well as branches. For the first time, a scientist called JohnBackus borrowed from linguistics the terms “syntax” and “semantics” thatcould be as well applied to describe the Algol language. He also introducedthe concept of “metalanguage” formulas to create program specifications,BNF (Backus Normal Forms). The formulas establish syntactic rules for avalid Algol usage.
In parallel to the BNF metalanguage, it was Chomsky's new theories thatgained attention. He clarified for the first time what a language should mean “a (possibly infinite) set of sentences, each sentence being composed of afinite set of elements” [3]. The set of elements was referred to as thealphabet, but not every possible sentence is valid unless it obeys a set ofgrammar rules. The metalinguistic formulas from the Algol 60 Revised Report corresponded
to Chomsky's formulas and interpretations. A grammar with rules involvingterminal and nonterminal symbols was called contextfree grammar, whichbelongs to Chomsky's “Type 2” languages from his hierarchy. Although thistype of language proved inadequate for describing natural languages inlinguistics, in the field of computer science it became very important andremained useful until today, especially in the sphere of compilers.
The Chomsky hierarchy
Also known as ChomskySchutzenberger hierarchy, it appeared in 1956.
Class Grammar Languages AutomationType 0 Unrestricted Recursively enu
merable (Turingrecognizable)
Turing machine
Type – 1 Contextsensitive
Contextsensitive
Linearbounded
Type – 2 Contextfree Contextfree PushdownType – 3 Regular Regular Finite
Type 0 grammars are unrestricted grammars, also known as recursivelyenumerable languages, include all formal grammars. The languagesgenerated can all be recognized by a Turing machine. Type 0 includes all thenext three types as its subsets, but no machine can ever deal with itslanguages. Examples of Type 0 languages which are not a part of any of the three
subsets are: akbkck , or aj | j = 2k, etc.
Type 1 grammars are the contextsensitive grammars that generate thecontextsensitive languages. Such rules look like: A α β → α γ β, where Amust be a nonterminal. The language generated can be recognized by alinear bounded automaton. The languages are powerful and associated withpowerful machines.An example of grammar of Type 1 is:S aSBA→S abA→AB BA→bB bb→bA ba→aA aa→
This grammar defines the language anbnan, which is not contextfree.
Type 2 grammars (contextfree grammars) generate contextfree languages.Its specific rules look like: A → γ, with A a nonterminal and γ is containingterminals and/or nonterminals. Its languages can be recognized by nondeterministic pushdown automaton. One subset, the deterministic contextfree language, is widely found in the theory of programming languages, agrammar for generating it being the LL parser – a topdown parser whichanalyzes input from left to right, making a leftmost derivation of a sentence.It is a simple language generator, but more powerful than Type 2.An example of language is one for an arithmetic expression in aprogramming language:exp ::= exp PLUS exp ::= exp MINUS exp ::= exp TIMES exp ::= INT | ID
Type 3 grammars generate the regular languages. Its rules have a singlenonterminal in the left side and a single terminal in the right side. It can byobtained by applying regular expressions and modeled using a finitestateautomaton. In programming languages, the theory is used in the lexicalanalysis and for matching patterns. It is the simplest language generator. An example of language is a natural numbers production, which in regularexpression can be written as 0 | [19][09]* . Nowadays, most of the modernprogramming languages have support for regular expression interpretation,which is a very simple and elegant method for testing patterns.
AI and NLP
Another field that Noam Chomsky influenced is the Natural LanguageProcessing from AI. The field of NLP originated in 1940, and at the timeChomsky published his first major book, he raised some problems regardingthe validity of certain sentences, which are grammatically incorrect. Heclaimed that they are expected to be classified as nonsense by the machinemodels as well. The field of NLP split into two until 1970s: symbolic and stochastic researchrespectively. The symbolic or rulebased branch corresponded to research informal languages and syntax generation, and was composed of linguists andcomputer scientists working together to create what they considered to bethe beginning of Artificial Intelligence. The stochastic branch, in change,focused on problems of character recognition and pattern matching.
From 19831993, the researchers decided that certain arguments ofChomsky and others from 1950s and 1960s were not as accurate as it wasbelieved in that period.
A recent argument took place between Noam Chomsky and Peter Norvig,researcher, professor and author of the most popular AI book in the world.Chomsky pronounced himself in favor of a theory of intelligence andlanguage which would simplify the structures underneath as much aspossible, whereas Norvig emphasized the statistical way, even though itmight not satisfy or be good for every single piece of data. According to MIT'sTechnology Review in 2011, “Chomsky derided researchers in machinelearning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimicssomething in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of thatbehavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might studythe dance made by a bee returning to the hive, and who could produce astatistically based simulation of such a dance without attempting tounderstand why the bee behaved that way. “That’s a notion of [scientific]success that’s very novel. I don’t know of anything like it in the history ofscience,” said Chomsky.” On the other hand, Chomsky's theories became more and more complex asthe years passed, models were no longer simple but depending on very manyparameters. The current AI approach to language translation and understanding ismassively relying on statistics, with the usage of big data, sometimesmaking grammar rules useless. The Google approach itself is not to reallyunderstand language, but to gather more and more data and then to deliverthe most probable answer to a query. Norvig believes that human languageis too complex to be described in a simple model that Chomsky insists upon.
Psychology and cognitive science
The Princeton scientist George Miller, who lived the birth of cognitivescience, appreciated in 2003 that “Behaviorism was an exciting adventurefor experimental psychology but by the mid1950s it had become apparentthat it could not succeed. As Chomsky remarked, defining psychology as thescience of behavior was like defining physics as the science of meter reading(…) I was therefore ready for Chomsky’s alternative to Markov processes.Once I understood that Shannon’s Markov processes could not converge onnatural language, I began to accept syntactic theory as a better account ofthe cognitive processes responsible for the structural aspects of humanlanguage. The grammatical rules that govern phrases and sentences are not
behavior, they are mentalistic hypotheses about the cognitive processesresponsible for the verbal behaviors we observe.”Slowly, the scientific community would disembarrass itself from thebehaviorist ideas, as the abovementioned suggested, that “In 1951, Iapparently still hoped to gain scientific respectability by swearing allegianceto behaviorism. Five years later, inspired by such colleagues as NoamChomsky and Jerry Bruner, I had stopped pretending to be a behaviorist. SoI date the cognitive revolution in psychology to those years in the early1950s.” He was later to become one of the founders of cognitive science.
Political views
Chomsky's intellectual life has been divided between his work in linguisticsand his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Nonetheless,his international political lectures and debates get more attention thesedays.Chomsky described himself as libertarian socialist, with sympathies foranarchosyndicalism and of the leftwing of US politics. He has taken firmstands on multiple issues, such as freedom of speech, terrorism, US foreignaffairs and wars in different parts of the world, US government, capitalismand corporatism, Middle East, etc. As for the ArabIsraeli conflict, Chomskysupports their cooperation and criticizes Israel's policies as well as theAmerican support for Israel.
Chomsky’s image in the academia world is an example of how a majorintellectual voice can be silenced or marginalized in the world of universities.First of all, academic people insist to separate Chomsky the linguist fromChomsky the political speaker. As a linguist, Chomsky has authority andreputation. However, his critics regard him as having a questionablecompetence in foreign policy or political sciences in general. Chomsky’spolitical writings are rejected by scholars in the name of peer review. Hisstyle of writing is easily accessible and even simplistic, therefore in the eyesof scholars appearing not enough professional to consider. Outside of theUSA, he is invited to give friendly talks in campuses, but in the US he stillremains mostly ignored in relevant departments such as political sciences.However, Chomsky's linguistic theories and his political philosophy are byno means unconnected as he attacked the radical behaviorism andsubsequently defending language as not merely “a set of habits” similar toanimal communication. He posted the same criticism against thesociologists, psychologists and other social scientists often consulted by thegovernment. The unification of his linguistics with his politics is based on
the fact that human beings are different from animals and “this differenceshould be respected both in science and in government”. Another aspect to point is his attitude somewhat unlikely for an academicianin that he refuses to praise the elite institutions and, moreover, criticizestheir foundations. He stated that: “Intellectuals are both the main victims ofthe propaganda system and also its main architects. “ – quote from“Propaganda and the public mind”.
Chomsky and the youth
We could say that, despite his age, Chomsky is still a modern man, alwaysin touch with the current world affairs and the youth. In 2012, he performeda role in the "MIT Gangnam Style", a parody of the "Gangnam Style" musicvideo. Moreover, he is the main character in a critically acclaimed filmnamed “Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?”, which was produced in 2013. Hehas a number of other documentaries and his online popularity is quite high.
Conclusion
Chomsky triggered a revolution when he explored language hierarchy, amethod of classification that has impacted the computer science field as well.His linguistic discoveries have also benefited the field of psychology.Chomsky contributed to the literary field with a plethora of books and hasbeen recognized for his work as an activist, philosopher, scientist, andprofessor with numerous honorary degrees and awards, including theBenjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and theAmerican Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific ContributionAward. As one of the science “legendaries” who is still alive, we can expect tostill hear more about him in coming years.
References
[1] “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent”, Robert F. Barsky, The MIT Press, 1998[2] “The Chomsky Notebook”, multiple authors, edited by Jean Bricmont andJulie Franck, 2010[3] “It began with Babbage – The genesis of Computer Science” Subrata Dasgupta, chapter 13[4] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/200405/nlp/overview_history.html
[5] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvigvschomskyandthefightforthefutureofai[6] “Penguin modern masters – Noam Chomsky”, John Lyons, 1977[7] “The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective”, George A. Miller,Princeton 2003