‘‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The calling card for a linguist ready to knock over the apple cart of mainstream behavioural psychology in 1950s academia. A sentence may be grammatically correct but nonsensical. Grammar reigns, whether at a Surface, Deep or Universal level.
Who is he? Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 to Ashkenazi parents of Ukrainian and Belarusian origin. His father worked long hours for low wages before becoming a Hebrew scholar and academic, while his mother taught at a synagogue. His parents he has described as “New Deal Democrats”.
The boy attended a school established on the principles of John Dewey, the educational reformer and pragmatist philosopher: learning should be experiential; knowledge
