Noam Chomsky（1928--），born on December7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.American linguist，founder of Transformational-generative grammar, he spent his undergraduate and graduate years at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955.He kept on working at Maachusetts Institute of Technology as the director of the Department of linguistic and philosophy since the autumn of 1955, and has cultivated a lot of literacy scholars in linguistics.
Chomsky is a linguist full of exploration spirit.At the very beginning, he studies Hebrew using the structuralism methods, later he found that there are a lot of limitations in this method，then he turned to a new one-- transformational-generative grammar, the syntactic structure published in 1957 is the symbol of this new method.This kind of analysis has become talk of the town all over the world, chattered the dominant status of structural linguistics, and thus was called “the Chomsky revolution”.He continued to develop and enrich the theory and method of transformational-generative grammar, and succeeded in publishing many linguistics works which produced great influence on world’s linguistic direction of development, such as aspects of the theory of syntax, on nature and language, current iues in linguistic theory, Chomsky’s universal grammar, and so on.It is still under development now.
Chomsky is an important figure in contemporary linguistics.The theory of Chomsky has a considerable impact not only in linguistics but also in many other fields such as philosophy, psychology and so on.The emergency and development of computer science also is closely related to Chomsky’s theory.Chomsky is even called the “ancestor” of computer science.
