John Goldsmith (linguist)

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John Goldsmith
John Goldsmith.jpg
Born1951
Alma mater MIT, Swarthmore
Awards Fellow of the AAAS
Scientific career
Fields Phonology, Generative grammar
Institutions University of Chicago, Indiana University
Doctoral advisor Morris Halle

John Anton Goldsmith (born 1951) is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science. [1] [2]

Contents

Biography

Goldsmith obtained his B.A. at Swarthmore College in 1972, and completed his PhD in Linguistics at MIT in 1976, under the linguist Morris Halle. [3] He was on the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University [4] before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at many universities, such as McGill, Harvard, and UCSD. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [5]

Research

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics. [6] His PhD thesis introduced autosegmental phonology; the idea that phonological phenomena is a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments, each representing certain features of speech. [7] His more recent research focuses on unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (as demonstrated by the Linguistica project, [8] a body of software that tries to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Books

Related Research Articles

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

Autosegmental phonology is a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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References

  1. "Faculty | Department of Computer Science | The University of Chicago". cs.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. "John Goldsmith". University of Chicago Department of Linguistics. Archived from the original on 21 January 2013. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  3. "Alumni and their Dissertations – MIT Linguistics". linguistics.mit.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  4. Botne, Robert. "African Linguistics at IU". Archived from the original on 2016-05-11. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  5. "List of Active Members by Class" (PDF). American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  6. "John A. Goldsmith - Citations Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  7. Leben, Will (2016-06-09). "Autosegmental Phonology". Autosegmental Phonology. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.365. ISBN   9780199384655.
  8. "Linguistica home page 2". people.cs.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.