Keith Allan (linguist)

Last updated

Keith Allan
Born (1943-03-27) 27 March 1943 (age 81)
NationalityAustralian
Occupation Emeritus Professor of Linguistics
Employer Monash University

Keith Allan, FAHA (born 27 March 1943) [1] is an Australian linguist and Emeritus Professor at Monash University.

Contents

Allan sees language as a form of social interactive behaviour and believes this to be an important consideration in any thorough account of meaning in natural language. While he is interested in all aspects of meaning in language, his main interests are semantics, pragmatics, linguistic meta-theory and the history and philosophy of linguistics.

Biography

Early life

After schooling in London, Allan went to do drama at University of Leeds, but once there, took up linguistics instead, receiving a BA (Hons) in 1964. From Leeds, he went to Ghana and then to the University of Edinburgh as a research associate where he completed an MLitt in 1970 and a Ph.D. presenting the thesis "Singularity and plurality in English noun phrases: a study in grammar and pragmatics". [2] After three years as a lecturer in the English language at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, he returned to the UK as a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Essex. Then after three more years at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, he signed up for a doctorate at Edinburgh on NP countability, receiving his PhD in 1978. [3] He arrived at Monash University in 1978, where – but for a year in Tucson at the University of Arizona and a few odd months elsewhere – he has stayed until his retirement in 2011.

Career

Currently the co-editor of Australian Journal of Linguistics with Jean Mulder, Allan has published articles in refereed journals, books and conference proceedings. He was semantics editor for both editions of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, [4] as well as section editor for "Logical and Lexical Semantics" in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. [5] He also edited the 2001 and 2006 conference proceedings for the Australian Linguistic Society.

In 2003, Allan received the Centenary Medal "For service to Australian society and the humanities in linguistics and philology". [6]

In the early years of Open Learning Australia, Allan helped develop some distance education modules at both undergraduate and MA level. At this time too, he made significant contributions to the distance education modules for the MA in Applied Linguistics at Monash University, revising several modules in later years for online delivery.

Selected publications

Journal articles

Books

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non-count nouns are distinguished from count nouns.

In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions. English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural, both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos." respectively. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.

The plural, in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one. Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word cats, which corresponds to the singular cat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative grammar</span> Theory in linguistics

Generative grammar, or generativism, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving from logical syntax and glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans.

In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.

Kathryn "Kate" Burridge is a prominent Australian linguist specialising in the Germanic languages. Burridge currently occupies the Chair of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement. Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives. Languages with overt nominal agreement vary in how and to what extent agreement is required.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English language</span> West Germanic language

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.

<i>Fewer</i> versus <i>less</i> Grammatical usage debate

Fewer versus less is a debate in English grammar about the appropriate use of these two determiners. Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer and not less should be used with count nouns, and that less should be used only with mass nouns. This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then. However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both count nouns and mass nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less. As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”

Dalabon is a Gunwinyguan language of Arnhem Land, Australia. It is a severely endangered language, with perhaps as few as three fluent speakers remaining as of 2018. Dalabon is also known as Dangbon, Ngalkbun, and Buwan.

In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Felix Ameka</span> Ghanian linguist

Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University and teaches in the departments of Linguistics, African Languages and cultures, and African Studies. In recognition of his pioneering work on cross-cultural semantics and his long-standing research ties with Australian universities, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2019.

References

  1. Neale, Alison, ed. (2003). International who's who of authors and writers 2004. Psychology Press. ISBN   1-85743-179-0. p. 12
  2. Allan, K. (1978). "Singularity and plurality in English noun phrases: a study in grammar and pragmatics".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. K., Allan (1978). "Singularity and plurality in English noun phrases: a study in grammar and pragmatics". hdl:1842/17129.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Frawley, William, ed. (2003) [1992]. International encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-513977-1.
  5. Brown, Keith, ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2 ed.). Elsevier. ISBN   0-08-044299-4.
  6. "It's an honour". Australian Government. Retrieved 8 February 2011.