The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Humans are storytelling beings. As far as we know, no other species has the capacity for language and ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. From our earliest days, we name and describe things.

Although it’s still too early to say for sure, four Israeli scientists may be at the fore of a new revolution in linguistics — or perhaps more accurately, a counterrevolution. The original revolution ...

Have you ever wondered why so many reporters don’t know that “criterion” is singular and “criteria” is plural? How many times have you read something like this in a magazine: “The student who brings a ...

A team of neuroscientists has found new support for linguist Noam Chomsky's decades-old theory that we possess an 'internal grammar' that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases. A team of ...

Noam Chomsky is a leading linguistic scientist and a longtime professor at MIT. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures outlined his theories of transformational generative grammar and made him a prominent ...

Linguistics was a late arrival on the academic scene. Until the 1950s, few dedicated departments existed, but then the combination of Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary theory of generative grammar and Cold ...

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences category has gone to Noam Chomsky 'for his unparalleled contributions to the study of human language,' in the ...

You can order Gnome Chomsky, the Garden Noam for $195, plus shipping. A “What Would Noam Do?” mug can be yours for $15. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” an oft-repeated demonstration of how ...

Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children ...