During the 1950s, he became inspired by the prospect of extending Roman Jakobson's 'distinctive features' approach—now hugely successful—far beyond its original field of application. Jakobson had already persuaded a young social anthropologist—Claude Lévi-Strauss—to apply distinctive features theory to the study of kinship systems, in this way inaugurating 'structural anthropology'. Chomsky—who got his job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thanks to the intervention of Jakobson and his student, Morris Halle—hoped to explore the extent to which similar principles might be applied to the various sub-disciplines of linguistics, including syntax and semantics.[6] If the phonological component of language was demonstrably rooted in a digital biological 'organ' or 'device', why not the syntactic and semantic components as well?