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Linguist, social/political theorist; born in Philadelphia. Son of a distinguished Hebrew scholar, he was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was especially influenced by Zellig Harris; after taking his M.A. there in 1951, he spent four years as a junior fellow at Harvard (1951--55), then was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1955). In 1955 he began what would be his long teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became known as one of the principal founders of transformational-generative grammar, a system of linguistic analysis that challenges much traditional linguistics and has much to do with philosophy, logic, and psycholinguistics; his book Syntactic Structures (1957) was credited with revolutionizing the discipline of linguistics. Chomsky's theory suggests that every human utterance has two structures: surface structure, the superficial combining of words, and "deep structure," which are universal rules and mechanisms. In more practical terms, the theory argues that the means for acquiring a language is innate in all humans and is triggered as soon as an infant begins to learn the basics of a language. Outside this highly rarefied sphere, Chomsky early on began to promote his radical critique of American political, social, and economic policies, particularly of American foreign policy as effected by the Establishment and presented by the media; he was outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War and later to the Persian Gulf War. His extensive writings in this area include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (1978).