Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist whose 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures founded generative grammar, the proposal that a speaker's grammatical competence is a finite system of formal rules capable of generating an unbounded number of well-formed sentences, including ones never previously spoken or heard. His subsequent argument that the human capacity for language is substantially innate, rather than learned purely from environmental input, reoriented linguistics away from the behaviorist and purely descriptive approaches that had dominated the field, and remains among the most debated positions in the philosophy of language and cognitive science.