A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов

      Chomsky has always been a rather private person, writing, “I'm really a hermit by nature, and would much prefer to be alone working than to be in public” (quoted in Falk 1994, 597, n.1). Nevertheless, aspects of his personal life and education, especially up to his appointment to MIT in his mid‐twenties, are illuminating of the origins of his future work and political engagement.

      Here we try to summarize some of the main biographical facts about Chomsky's life. It is impossible to do full justice to the milieux that have influenced Chomsky and that he has shaped in such in a short sketch. Interested readers should consult Barsky (1998, 2011) and Chomsky (1987, 2009) for much more detail.

      Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were born in the Russian empire (in what are now Ukraine and Belarus), but met in the United States. His father, William Chomsky, was a scholar and teacher of Hebrew and wrote a seminal book on the history of the Hebrew language. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), was also a Hebraist and educator. They taught and had leadership roles at Gratz College, which was both a teacher training college and a center for academic study of Judaism. (For discussion of the significant influence Chomsky's parents had on his thinking, see Barsky 1998, 9–14.)

Chomsky lived in Philadelphia until he moved to Boston in 1951. From the age of about 2 to 11, he attended a progressive Deweyite school run by Temple University, a school that emphasized creativity and encouraged students to pursue their own interests. He was already becoming intensely interested in politics. He describes himself as “a child of the Depression” with vivid early memories “of people selling rags at my door, of violent police strikebreaking, and other Depression scenes” (Chomsky 1987). He was also affected by international events, particularly the Spanish civil war. At the age of 10, he wrote his first article, an editorial for his school newspaper on the fall of Republican Barcelona to Franco's forces.

      Chomsky then went on to attend the Central High School in Philadelphia, a mainstream academically oriented school that he found competitive and unpleasant: “I remember virtually nothing about high school […] apart from the emotional tone, which was quite negative” (Chomsky 1987; see also Chomsky 2009; Peck 1987, 5–6). Chomsky recalls that at this time, he was influenced by members of his extended family and their political environment, more working class and left wing than his parents. From the age of 13, he would travel on his own to New York, where an uncle ran a newsstand, “which was sort of a radical center. We'd hang out all night and have discussions and arguments” (Chomsky 1987; see also McGilvray 2009).

      In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, paying for his education by teaching Hebrew in the evenings and on Sundays. At the beginning he found the structure stifling and the classes largely uninteresting: the exceptions were courses on Arabic and a freshman course in philosophy. He was planning to drop out after two years to pursue his political interests (Chomsky 1987; Barsky 1998, 47).

      However, in 1947 those political interests led to Chomsky getting to know Zellig Harris: they were both radical left‐wing Zionists. But Harris was also one of the most important linguistic structuralists in the United States, and he was working on what became his most influential contribution: Methods in Structural Linguistics, completed in 1947 (but published as Harris 1951). Harris gave Chomsky the proofs to read and Chomsky decided to go on with linguistics. On Harris's recommendation, Chomsky took seminars with the philosopher Nelson Goodman, with whom he became close friends, as well as courses with the philosophers Morton White, Richard Martin, and Henry Hiż, and the mathematician Nathan Fine (Chomsky 1987; Hughes 2001; Meguire 2005). Chomsky received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, having written an undergraduate thesis on the morphophonemics of Hebrew, which already included key elements of what was to become generative grammar. (He extended and revised this as his master's thesis in 1951.)

      Also in 1949, Chomsky married Carol Schatz, a fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania. They came from the same community in Philadelphia – her mother worked at the Hebrew school where William Chomsky was the principal – and they had first met as young children (Marquard 2008). They had three children, Aviva (born 1957), Diane (1960), and Harry (1967), and were married until her death in 2008. In the 1960s, when Chomsky was involved in political demonstrations and resistance activities and at risk of being jailed, Carol Chomsky went back to university to get a doctorate, anticipating that she would need to be the breadwinner for the family (Marquand 2008). She made important contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children (e.g. C. Chomsky 1969), working from 1972 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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