A. Noam Chomsky
University of Arizona
Primary Section: 52, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1972)
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Research Interests
My current work is centered on a system of principles and parameters developed and widely investigated in the past few years, a variant of transformational generative grammar, in particular, the role of general principles of economy of computation in explaining principles of language. Recent work has converged in a "minimalist program" that explores the possibility that the apparently intricate and varied computational structure of languages, which relates sound and meaning, is actually a near-invariant system that is a kind of 'optimal' solution for externally imposed conditions.