LIFE:

Noam Abraham Chomsky; Philadelphia, (1928).

Linguist and political activist, who criticism contemporary capitalism and the foreign
policy of the United States.

-Considered the "father of modern linguistics".

-He proposed generative grammar and universal grammar.
-Revolutionized the field of theoretical linguistics with only 29 years
-He has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1961.

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE:

He was interested in writing a grammar of competence, which refers to the knowledge
that a ideal speaker/listener has about her/his language. Linguistic competence is
concerned with the child´s grammar, the linguistic input and construction of the
gramatical structures.
However, he wasn´t in perfomance, that is the knowledge that lies dormant in a person´s
mind. It deals with the nature of child´s rule system; the psychological processes the child
uses in learning the language, and how the child establishes meaning in the language
input.

“We are born with a set of rules”

 The system of principles, conditions and rules that are elements or properties of
all human languages.
 Universal gramar is a theory of knowledge whose concern is with the internal
structure of the human mind.

Chomsky´s Theory Universal Grammar

Children are born with an innate capacity for language/linguistic knowledge. Humans
are pre-programmed to learn language. Every child has the potential to learn any
language in the world.
 This innate capacity of knowledge is called Universal Grammar.
 Knowledge of those things common to all languages (have subjects and
predicates, pre/post-prepositions).
 He establishes that language acquisition is an inherent competence where every
human sice they born have the capacity to acquire linguistic knowledge.
 Proposed to use the language acquisition device (LAD). This ability provides the
basis to assimilate the structure of a language.