Noam Chomsky

Linguist, philosopher, and MIT Institute Professor emeritus, widely regarded as the most influential linguist of the twentieth century. In the late 1950s and 1960s he founded generative grammar and formal language theory, proposing that human languages are best described by phrase-structure rules combined with syntactic ‘movement’ — the idea that sentence forms like questions are derived by literally moving elements (an auxiliary verb, for instance) from an underlying ‘deep structure’ to a ‘surface structure’. He argued in 1971 that this movement is unlearnable from the sentences a child actually hears, concluding that much of grammar must be innate — a built-in ‘universal grammar’ from which every human language is a parameter setting. Chomsky has also argued, against rival accounts, that language underpins thought itself, and that full compositionality is a uniquely human trait absent from any other species’ communication.

Chomsky spent his career in MIT’s linguistics department, across the street from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department where Edward Gibson works; the two were colleagues for over thirty years. Chomsky’s method — intuition-based thought experiments rather than controlled experiment or corpus analysis — is the central methodological line Gibson draws between them.

In the wiki

• Edward Gibson on Human Language, Psycholinguistics, and LLMs — Gibson’s sustained disagreement with Chomsky’s movement theory and innateness argument, and his preference for dependency grammar and lexical copying instead
• Dependency Length Minimisation — includes Gibson’s contrasting account of word order and grammar
• Language and Mind — the wiki’s broader synthesis on language and thought, including Chomsky’s universal grammar and its reception

See also

• Edward Gibson — MIT colleague and principal critic of movement and innateness