Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky

Posted By Gary Marcus

Noam Chomsky turns eighty-four today, more than a half century after he exploded onto the scene of linguistics, in in the late nineteen-fifties, as a young professor at M.I.T. His career began perhaps most notably with a book review that helped launch an entire field of linguistics (known as generative grammar) and laid waste to another (the behaviorist view of B. F. Skinner that then dominated psychology). From that moment forward, linguistics truly has never been the same.

None of the questions Chomsky has posed has yet been fully answered, to his satisfaction or to anybody else’s, but no scholar of the mind has ever been more influential. Chomsky may not always have the right answers. But he has always had the wisdom to pose the right questions.

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Photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum.