Avram Noam Chomsky, is a prominent American linguist, political scientist, philosopher, born in Philadelphia in the year 1928. Considered an important character in 20th century linguistics, due to his theories about cognitive science and linguistics. Chomsky is also characterized by being a recognized political activist, since he has always maintained a critical position on contemporary capitalism and the foreign policy that the United States maintains.
Noam Chomsky grew up in a Jewish family, was able to learn the Hebrew language and often heard countless debates about the politics of Zionism, as his family was related to left-wing Zionism, something that influenced his studies and your concerns about the world of reasoning.
He contributed much to modern linguistics through the theoretical formulation and evolution of the concept of transformational grammar, the main innovation of which lies in the breakdown of two different levels in the analysis of sentences. On the one hand, the transcendent structure, a series of rules of great generality, from which originates, through a set of transformation rules, the superficial arrangement of the sentence.
This methodology allows to reason the transcendental structural identity, between the apparently different sentences, as it usually happens, in general, between the passive and active mode of the sentence.
Some of his contributions in linguistics are:
- He argues that there must be a precise knowledge, before the experience, that makes the child be able to handle all these notions in a better way, more quickly and without explicit teaching.
- It does not consider that children learn, just because educators strive to use mechanisms for the execution of correct verbal behavior. For example, if the child spells badly, he is punished and if he does it well, he is rewarded.
Apart from their linguistic career, Noam Chomsky participated in some respects political, generating strong polemics with his accusations about US imperialism, since it was launched the war in Vietnam and continued criticism of how politics and the economy is handled in the United States.
