A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
in 1951, Noam having become, on Goodman's advice and recommendation, a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows: “the first time I could devote myself to study and research without working on the side” (Chomsky 1987). During the four years at Harvard (with a period abroad on a socialist kibbutz in Israel for about six weeks in 1953), he got to know graduate students Morris Halle and Eric Lenneberg, as well as the noted linguist Roman Jakobsen and the philosophers W.V.O. Quine and J.L. Austin (who visited Harvard in 1955). Chomsky pursued his own approach to linguistics, appealing to abstract structure in accounting for linguistic patterns: a massive break with Zellig Harris's theory.
Chomsky was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, based on only one chapter of his thesis, a roughly 500‐page manuscript that came to be widely circulated in mimeograph, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (finally published in slightly revised form in 1975). The manuscript was highly influential, in particular for the more technical and formal aspects of the new approach to language that Chomsky was developing.
In 1955, on the recommendation of Jakobsen, Chomsky joined MIT as an assistant professor (Barsky 1998, 86). He was in theory supposed to work on a machine translation project in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, but that never happened. Instead, he worked on what became Syntactic Structures, and taught undergraduate philosophy courses, among others. In 1961, he was promoted to full professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, and then appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics in 1966. In 1976, he was appointed Institute Professor, the highest honor MIT bestows on a faculty member. After his official retirement in 2002, he continued to work and serve the MIT community until the fall of 2017.
In the late 1950s, Chomsky's work had begun to receive some recognition; he was invited to major conferences, and people started to become familiar with some of his revolutionary ideas. His name became significantly more visible as a result of his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner (see the synoptic introduction). With his attack on behaviorism, he became one of the preeminent figures in what later became known as the “cognitive revolution,” and his fame within the field of linguistics continued to grow.
From the early 1960s, Chomsky became increasingly engaged in political activities (Hughes 2001). A significant turning point came in February 1967 with the publication of “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in the New York Review of Books. With this essay, he emerged as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam (for appraisal of its significance, see Allott 2019; Parini 2017), and since then, he has been a highly visible public intellectual, known in particular for his critique of American foreign policy and his work with Edward Herman on the role of the mass media in democracies in “manufacturing consent.”1
Since the 1960s, Chomsky has published prodigiously on both linguistics and politics. His work in syntax has revolutionalized the field several times, but it has always explored the implications of studying grammar in the way that he set out in the 1950s and early 1960s, as a generative mental system, largely innately specified. For several decades he traveled the world nearly continuously and he has given countless public and specialized talks to all sorts of audiences.
Chomsky has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees. In 1988, he received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences, created in 1984 to recognize work in areas not included among the Nobel Prizes. Other awards include the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Leonard Euler Medal, the Erich Fromm Prize, the British Academy's Neil and Saras Smith Medal for linguistics and the Collar of the Order of Timor‐Leste. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the American Psychological Society, and the Linguistic Society of America.
In 2014, Chomsky married Luisa Valéria Galvão‐Wasserman, a translator for the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Since the fall of 2017, they have lived in Tucson, Arizona, where Chomsky was appointed a laureate professor in linguistics at the University of Arizona and also holds the title of Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Helms Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice. In his 93rd year, he still teaches courses on linguistics and on issues relating to his political activist work.
Endnote
1 1 On the motivation for Chomsky's political work, John Horgan writes: “I once asked Chomsky which work he found more satisfying, his political activism or his linguistic research. He seemed surprised that I needed to ask. Obviously, he replied, he spoke out against injustice merely out of a sense of duty; he took no intellectual pleasure from it. If the world's problems suddenly disappeared, he would happily, joyfully, devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” (Horgan 2016).
References
1 Allott, N. 2019. Introduction: “The responsibility of intellectuals”: What it does and does not say. In The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections By Noam Chomsky and Others After 50 Years, edited by N. Allott, C. Knight, and N. V. Smith, 1–4. London: UCL Press.
2 Barsky, R. F. 1998. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: MIT Press.
3 Barsky, R. F. 2011. Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
4 Chomsky, C. 1969. The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10. Cambridge: MIT Press.
5 Chomsky, N. 1967. The responsibility of intellectuals. The New York Review of Books February 23, 1967. Available at https://chomsky.info/19670223/
6 Chomsky, N. 1987. Personal influences [excerpted from The Chomsky Reader]. Available at https://chomsky.info/reader01/
7 Chomsky, N. 2009. Infinite History Project [video interview with Karen Arenson]. Available at https://archive.org/details/NoamChomsky-InfiniteHistoryProject-2009/
8 Falk, R. 1994. Letters from prison – American style: The political vision and practice of Noam Chomsky. In Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, edited by C. P. Otero, 578–597. London: Routledge.
9 Harris, Z. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
10 Herman, E. S., and N. Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.
11 Horgan, J. 2016. Noam Chomsky is so anti‐establishment he disses himself. Scientific American blog, November 29, 2016. Available at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/noam-chomsky-is-so-anti-establishment-he-disses-himself/
12 Hughes, S. 2001. Speech! The Pennsylvania Gazette, July/Aug 2001. Accessed at https://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0701/hughes.html
13 Marquard, B. 2008. Carol Chomsky; at 78; Harvard language professor was wife of MIT linguist. The Boston Globe, December 20, 2008. Accessed at http://archive.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/12/20/carol_chomsky_at_78_harvard_language_professor_was_wife_of_mit_linguist/
14 Meguire, P. 2005. Richard Milton Martin: American logician. The Review of Modern Logic, 10 (1‐2): 7–66.
15 McGilvray, J. 2009. Noam Chomsky: American linguist. In Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Noam-Chomsky.
16 Parini, J. 2017. Noam Chomsky's “Responsibility of intellectuals”