Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same).
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Two major sources for inspiration for the approach described here are the ideas of generative linguist Ray Jackendoff on language faculty and modularity and Global Workspace Theory, as advanced by Bernard Baars.
He also played an indirect but potentially important part in establishing contemporary generative linguistics and cognitive science—Noam Chomsky has credited Levi Della Vida with helping to stimulate his early interest in linguistics as an undergraduate, describing his course as 'the one freshman course that I found really engaging'.