FTP, name this linguist and polemicist, author of the scientific Syntactic Structures and political Imperial Ambitions.
His most notorious publication is likely the article "Distortions at Fourth Hand," in which he apologized for the Khmer Rouge, and he also wrote the preface to a book by Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, claiming that he was defending the principle of free speech. His assault on B.F. Skinner's theories helped to initiate the cognitive revolution in psychology, and his namesake hierarchy ranks the expressive power of formal languages, a concept important in automata theory. His "principles and parameters" approach to language acquisition posits the existence of a universal grammar, and he believes that grammar is transformational and generative. FTP, name this linguist and polemicist, author of the scientific Syntactic Structures and political Imperial Ambitions.
His most notorious publication is likely the article "Distortions at Fourth Hand," in which he apologized for the Khmer Rouge, and he also wrote the preface to a book by Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, claiming that he was defending the principle of free speech.
Noam Chomsky