Word.ws English Dictionary

Chomskyan

Chomskyan adjective: relating to the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.

Adjective

Chomskyan (comparative more Chomskyan, superlative most Chomskyan)

  1. Relating to the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.
    • A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams.1989, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 107
  2. Of or relating to the theoretical approach introduced by Noam Chomsky, et al., especially transformational grammar.
    • The differences between acceptable constructions like "Have you a book on modern music?" and unacceptable ones like "Read you a book on modern music?" need no Chomskyan signposts for a native speaker, and have very little to do with statistical probability but a lot to do with common sense.1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 155
    • According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols.1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, New York: Bantam Books, →ISBN, page 276

Noun

Chomskyan (plural Chomskyans)

  1. A follower or adherent of Chomsky's linguistic theories; a transformational grammarian.

Forms of Chomskyan

Adjective
comparativemore Chomskyan
superlativemost Chomskyan
alternative formChomskian
Noun
pluralChomskyans

Origin of Chomskyan

From Chomsky + -an.

Questions about Chomskyan

What does Chomskyan mean?
Chomskyan means relating to the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.
What part of speech is Chomskyan?
Chomskyan can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near Chomskyan in the dictionary

  1. Chomskian
  2. Chomsky
  3. Chomsky hierarchies
  4. Chomsky hierarchy
  5. Chomsky Normal Form
  6. Chomskyan
  7. Chomskyanism
  8. Chomskyans
  9. Chomskyist
  10. Chomskyists
  11. Chomskyite

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Chomskyan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Chomskyan.wav.

Cite this entry: “Chomskyan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chomskyan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.