1957 he wrote a book Syntactic Structures where he introduces [transformational grammar]?. It was an elaboration of his doctoral thesis he wrote 1955. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to do carry out these processes is innate. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. One can think of a child learning to speak the mother's language that this language generating / analysing system (a [universal grammar]?) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on when the rule set becomes stabilized language learning becomes much harder.
Chomsky studied types of formal grammars as a way to represent a grammar system. He came up with a number of types he orders according to increasing complexity. This is now called the Chomsky hierarchy and is now used extensily in computer science. The grammar of regular languages for example encompasses all the rules needed for doing morphology.
A seminal work of him for phonology in the 20th century was The sound pattern of English. He published it together with [Morris Halle]?.
One of his better-known political texts is Manufacturing Consent -- The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he co-authored with [Edward S. Herman]? and which was intended to show how financial interests in the United States' media influence the news. Controversy over this text has been fierce and extensive.
It is worth noting that almost everything about Noam Chomsky's ideas are controversial, both in linguistics and politics. He has a great many detractors both in academia and the general public for his political writings; those same writings have earned him a great number of supporters among radicals and anarchists.
He was an outspoken critic of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
See also: Chomsky hierarchy /Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, Corporatocracy, Doublespeak
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