Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and anti-Semitism in the mid-1930s, stating, 'I don't like to say it but I grew up with a kind of visceral fear of Catholics. He describes his family as living in a sort of 'Jewish ghetto', split into a 'Yiddish side' and 'Hebrew side', with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up 'immersed in Hebrew culture and literature'.

Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was 'taboo' in his family to speak it. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in the United States and spoke 'ordinary New York English'. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist and a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism (he is a member of the IWW).Ĭhomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine.

Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 19 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most cited scholar overall. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power.īeginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known - especially internationally - for his media criticism and radical politics than for his linguistic theories. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman, Fodor). Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s.

He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B.F. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th century. East Oak Lane, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaĪvram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

William chomsky