David M. Perlmutter | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 28, 1938 [1] New York City, New York, U.S. [1] |
| Known for | Relational grammar Unaccusative Hypothesis |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1977) [2] President of the Linguistic Society of America (2000) [3] Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) [4] |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (A.B.) [1] MIT (Ph.D.) [5] |
| Doctoral advisor | Noam Chomsky [6] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguistics |
| Sub-discipline | Syntax,grammatical relations,sign language phonology |
| Institutions | MIT [1] Brandeis University [1] University of California,San Diego [7] |
David Michael Perlmutter (born 28 October 1938) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California,San Diego. [7] He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2000. [3] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. [4]
Perlmutter is best known as co-founder,with Paul Postal,of relational grammar,a syntactic framework that treats grammatical relations such as subject and object as primitive notions rather than as derivatives of phrase structure. [4]
Perlmutter received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 under the supervision of Noam Chomsky;his dissertation was titled Deep and surface constraints in syntax. [5] He joined the faculty at the University of California,San Diego in 1977. [6]
His Ph.D. dissertation was later published as a book:Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax (1971). [8]
With Paul Postal,Perlmutter developed relational grammar (RG),a framework that treats grammatical relations (such as subject,direct object,and indirect object) as core theoretical constructs rather than as configurations derived from phrase structure. [4] The approach was developed and presented in early form in RG lectures at the 1974 LSA Summer Linguistic Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [9]
Perlmutter edited Studies in Relational Grammar 1 (1983) and co-edited (with Carol Rosen) Studies in Relational Grammar 2 (1984),which developed and applied RG analyses across a wide range of languages. [10] [11]
Perlmutter's paper "Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis",presented at the 1978 Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting,is often cited as an early published statement of the Unaccusative Hypothesis. [9] In the paper's acknowledgements,Perlmutter states that the hypothesis itself was developed in joint work with Paul Postal. [9] A footnote credits Geoffrey Pullum with the terms unaccusative and unergative. [9]
The hypothesis distinguishes two subclasses of intransitive verbs:unaccusative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying direct object) and unergative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying subject). [9] It has been applied to phenomena including impersonal passives,auxiliary selection,and participial constructions across typologically diverse languages. [9] The distinction was later incorporated into multiple syntactic frameworks,including work in Government and Binding and Lexical Functional Grammar,and has been extensively discussed at the interface of syntax and lexical semantics. [12]
Perlmutter contributed to sign language phonology,including arguments that American Sign Language (ASL) exhibits syllable-like organisation. [4] With Carol Padden,he published "American Sign Language and the Architecture of Phonological Theory" (1987),analysing interactions between morphological and phonological processes in ASL. [13]
His paper "Sonority and Syllable Structure in American Sign Language" (1992) proposed a moraic approach to ASL syllable structure and explored analogies between movement/position contrasts and vowel/consonant contrasts in spoken-language phonology. [14]
Perlmutter was known for a problem-centred teaching style that emphasised discovery and explicit argumentation,including systematic comparison of competing analyses (often framed as "Hypothesis A" vs. "Hypothesis B"). [15]
This approach was adopted and extended by his students and colleagues at various institutions,including Jorge Hankamer at the University of California,Santa Cruz. [15]
Perlmutter co-authored with Scott Soames a textbook entitled Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English (1979). [16]