The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority - and so it remains - The Masses Against The Classes

NOAM CHOMSKY
(born 1928). "To find the principles common to all languages that enable people to speak creatively and freely" is Noam Chomsky's description of his goal as a linguist. Many recent works have stressed that all children go through the same stages of language development regardless of the language they are learning. In examining this, Chomsky gave linguistics, the study of human speech, a new direction.

Born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Avram Noam Chomsky was introduced to linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked with historical linguistics. Noam studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a doctoral degree in linguistics in 1955, and then he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His first book, 'Syntactic Structures', published in 1957, outlines his system of transformational grammar. This grammar consists of surface structures - the sounds and words in a sentence - and deep structures that contain the meaning of the sentence. The meaning is converted by a transformation - any of an ordered set of rules - to a surface structure. Chomsky says that children are born with a knowledge of the principles of the grammatical structure of all languages, and this inborn knowledge explains the success and speed with which they learn language. Further, his work implies that an understanding of the rules of a language throws light on the principles that regulate human thought. Other of his publications include 'The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory', published in 1975, and 'Modular Approach to the Study of the Mind' (1983).