Noam Chomsky has been polled as the world’s top intellectual (THT, Oct. 19). And it was not surprising to those who have been keeping track with his ongoing theorisation in linguistics, politics, and other fields. In his best seller “Language Instinct” Stephen Pinker, Harvard cognitive scientist, positioned him the seventh great intellectual in world history. As the originator of cognitive revolution, Chomsky brought about a revolution in our thinking not only about the nature of language but human nature as well. Currently, he has been working on the relation between language and mind, integrating it with neuroscience.

Born on December 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky completed his graduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania where he came into academic contact with Zellig Harris, a leading linguist and political theorist, who made a deep impact on his academic life and thinking. In 1955 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perhaps the world’s most prestigious academic institution, where he is presently Institute Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Professor Chomsky is mainly renowned for his theory of transformation-generative (TG) grammar, which has so far been the most influential of linguistic theories. His TG theory, proposed and spelled out in Syntactic Structures (1957), which is a part of his doctoral dissertation, has brought about a revolution in the field of linguistics, known as Chomskyan Revolution, through a change in structuralists’ paradigm in linguistics. Contrary to structural grammar, Chomskyan linguistics has adopted these assumptions: (i) Language is not the total number of sentences produced by a community; instead, it is competence, i.e. a set of rules underlying the actual and potential sentences. (ii) The goal of linguistics is not only taxonomic or classificatory but also explanatory, i.e. to construct a theory of language. (iii) Linguistic theory tries to account for not the corpus but the competence of a native speaker. (iv) Grammar should have the evaluation procedure which, given a corpus and two or more grammars, should tell us which grammar is better. These assumptions in Chomskyan paradigm succeeded in replacing structuralists’ taxonomy and naïve methodology by a set of better assumptions and went on to establish linguistics as a science.

Another striking observation Chomsky made is his innateness hypothesis. He assumed that as every normal human child is genetically determined to have arms instead of wings, s/he is also born with the capacity to acquire language. He termed this capacity as Universal Grammar located in the left hemisphere of brain. It is activated when a child has exposure to a language and helps her/him to acquire a language. Thus when humans start acquiring their mother tongues they do not have to begin from a scratch; instead, their mind is genetically endowed with a blueprint of language which helps them to acquire particular languages. Language acquisition is partly inborn and partly learned. It is because of this innate capability in human brain that there exist similarities across diverse human languages. It is again this capacity which differentiates humans from animals.

Chomsky also engaged in political activism. A severe critic of American foreign policy, he has devoted ample time to fight against the lies of the government and concentrated power. Chomsky realised that it was not easy for both linguistics and politics to go hand in hand. But he has been trying to keep them together. Much of his political writings deal with the use of language itself. Besides, he does not consider the two disciplines essentially different from the analytical point of view. Not everyone is happy with Chomsky’s way of thinking. Richard Montague, a philosopher, labelled him as one of the “two great frauds of the 20th century science” (the other being Einstein). But to others, Chomsky’s works are insightful. He revolutionised the way of thinking and attained a status in the history of ideas equivalent to Darwin or Descartes.

Neil Smith wrote an appropriate appraisal about Chomsky in his book “Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals” (1999): “In this century his peers in influence are such desperate figures as Einstein, Picasso, and Freud, with each of whom he has something in common. Like Freud he has changed our conception of the mind; like Einstein, he blends intense scientific creativity with radical political activism; like Picasso, he has overturned and replaced his own established systems with startling frequency.”

Chomsky does not believe in heroes, nor answering questions about his favourites such as Descartes, Rousseau, Russell and others. Nor does he like to be admired. When he was asked to comment on being polled top thinker, he replied that it was because the voters happened to be his admirers. For many of us he has become a hero. But there can be no gainsaying that he has fulfilled his expressed hope that “I’ve done something decent with my life.”

Yadava is professor of Linguistics, TU