It is more than a decade since the second edition of this book appeared: a decade in which the perils besetting the world have increased, in which developments in linguistics and the cognitive sciences have burgeoned, and in which Chomsky has continued to make a seminal academic contribution while still devoting the majority of his time and energy to political activism and the exposure of the lies and obfuscations of business and government across a huge range.

To understand and explain these developments and to do justice to Chomsky's continuing work it seemed necessary to widen the authorial expertise, so NVS enlisted the help of NEA, who has all the relevant knowledge and experience needed.

We have again left the basic plan of the book unchanged but we have attempted to update and revise it to reflect both advances in understanding and Chomsky's role in those advances. Where we have become aware of them we have corrected any mistakes and elucidated any obscurities in the earlier editions, and we have highlighted what we perceive to be the most notable innovations. This means that apart from adding some corroborative evidence we have left the opening introductory chapter mostly unchanged. The other chapters were less straightforward. In linguistics there has been a ferment of activity. While the Minimalist Program is still the dominant paradigm within the generative tradition, it has undergone some radical changes. Accordingly, we have modified and extended Chapter 2 in an attempt to explain and make more accessible the sometimes opaque theoretical and formal innovations in current work. Apart from his technical contributions to current syntactic theory, which we explain in some detail, Chomsky has devoted the majority of his recent academic work to the study of the evolution of the language faculty and we elaborate the earlier brief discussion accordingly.

In the psychology of language and psycholinguistics the most significant changes have been the increasing, and increasingly hostile, reactions to Chomsky's postulation of an innate “Universal Grammar” (UG), and the appearance of a range of “emergentist” alternatives. In Chapter 3 we discuss a number of these alternatives, dissect the claims being made, and adjudicate appropriately.