01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 |
The Founding of MIT's Graduate Program in
Linguistics
At thirty-one, Chomsky seemed to be on the brink of a glittering career in the academy. As well, he and Carol were becoming deeply involved in domestic life; they were determined to provide a serene and comfortable environment for their young children. But the Skinner review in Language had been a first step towards the establishment of Chomsky as a controversial public figure, and the political views for which he would soon become infamous were rapidly taking shape, fueled by his voracious reading habit. Chomsky had managed to maintain his interest in Jewish cultural issues, as well; he was still close to his parents and brother, and during his frequent treks home to Philadelphia to see them, he was able to renew his involvement in these issues.
|
|
Morris Halle's homepage @ MIT |
In the spring of 1959, Chomsky began working on a project involving
generative phonology, applying to the English language theories that
he had previously developed for analyzing Hebrew in
Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. He also continued to
explore the wider implications of his work, and was therefore becoming
a point of reference for researchers in numerous fields, including
philosophy, psychology, and, of course, linguistics. Chomsky's growing
eminence was also the result of his having begun a graduate program in
linguistics at mit with like-minded colleagues, notably Morris
Halle. The time was ripe for such a program. An evolution was
occurring within the field of linguistics, and MIT was prepared to allow Chomsky and Halle to
circumvent the usual red tape. As Chomsky recalls:
|
|
Paul Postal M. P. Schützenberger (bibliography) |
The program immediately attracted a number of gifted scholars, including Robert Lees, who had by then completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at MIT; Jerry Fodor and Jerry Katz, graduates of the Ph.D. program at Princeton; and Paul Postal, who had completed his Ph.D. at Yale. All were eventually named to the mit faculty Lees and Postal in linguistics, Fodor and Katz in philosophy; Lees, of course, was hired to work on the mechanical translation project. There were also John Viertel, a personal friend of Chomsky's who was not, and never had been, a graduate student ("an interesting guy an associate of Brecht's, among other things" [31 Mar. 1995]), and M. P. Schützenberger, a well-established mathematician and biologist who had often visited re at MIT ("where we became friends and to a certain extent colleagues, applying mathematical ideas of his to formal languages in published work" [31 Mar. 1995]). Fodor comments upon this era:
It's not much of a hyperbole to say that all of the people who were
interested in this kind of linguistics were at MIT. That's not quite true. There were others
scattered around. But for a while, we were pretty nearly all there
was. So communication was very lively, and I guess we shared a general
picture of the methodology for doing, not just linguistics, but
behaviorial science research. We were all more or less nativist, and
all more or less mentalist. There was a lot of methodological
conversation that one didn't need to have. One could get right to the
substantive issues. So, from that point of view, it was extremely
exciting. (qtd. in R. A. Harris 68)
At the age of thirty-three, Chomsky was made professor of foreign
languages and linguistics at mit. He found himself emerging from the
shadows of what had initially been a personal hobby and entering the
newly revitalized and promising field of linguistic studies.
|
