Neil Smith | |
---|---|
Born | 1939 |
Died | 16 November 2023 |
Academic background | |
Doctoral advisor | Dennis Fry |
Other advisors | Gordon Frederick Arnold |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Sub-discipline | Applied linguistics |
Institutions | University College London |
Doctoral students | Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli |
Neilson Voyne Smith FBA (born 1939,died 16 November 2023 [1] ),known as Neil Smith,was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London.
He wrote his PhD (1964) on the grammar of Nupe,a language of Nigeria. Since then his research has encompassed theoretical syntax,language acquisition,the savant syndrome,and general linguistic theory,particularly the work of Noam Chomsky.
In the 1990s he began working with an autistic man,Christopher,in collaboration with Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli. According to Smith and Tsimpli,Christopher has a non-verbal IQ of between 60 and 70,but his English is comparable to that of normal native speakers,and he has an extraordinary ability to learn new languages.
Smith was Head of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London from 1983 to 1990,and headed the Linguistics section from 1972 until his retirement in 2006,when he was presented with a Festschrift Language in Mind:A Tribute to Neil Smith on the Occasion of his Retirement (edited by Robyn Carston,Diane Blakemore and Hans van de Koot).
Smith was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1999. [2] He was made an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America in 2000.
Universal grammar (UG),in modern linguistics,is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty,usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition,children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However,the latter has not been firmly established,as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare,and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.
In linguistics,transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar,especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.
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.
Generative grammar is a theoretical approach in linguistics that regards grammar as a domain-specific system of rules that generates all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language. In light of poverty of the stimulus arguments,grammar is regarded as being partly innate,the innate portion of the system being referred to as universal grammar. The generative approach has focused on the study of syntax while addressing other aspects of language including semantics,morphology,phonology,and psycholinguistics.
Geoffrey Keith Pullum is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. Pullum has published over 300 articles and books on various topics in linguistics,including phonology,morphology,semantics,pragmatics,computational linguistics,and philosophy of language. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky,originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages,it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously",which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning,thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
In linguistics,linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance,which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.
In linguistics,glossematics is a structuralist theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall. It defines the glosseme as the most basic unit of language.
Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the controversial argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. The claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information needed to develop a thorough understanding of the grammar of the language.
Sir John Lyons FBA was a British linguist,working on semantics.
The term Cartesian linguistics was coined by Noam Chomsky in his book Cartesian Linguistics:A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). The adjective "Cartesian" pertains to RenéDescartes,a prominent 17th-century philosopher. As well as Descartes,Chomsky surveys other examples of rationalist thought in 17th-century linguistics,in particular the Port-Royal Grammar (1660),which foreshadows some of his own ideas concerning universal grammar.
In linguistics,the innateness hypothesis,also known as the nativist hypothesis,holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis,language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus,the universality of language acquisition,as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However,these arguments have been criticized,and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism,in linguistics,denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained,self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics,published posthumously in 1916,stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis,which define units syntactically and lexically,respectively,according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena,the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data,the priority of linguistic form over meaning,the marginalization of written language,and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social,behavioral,or cognitive phenomena.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky,first published in 1965. In Aspects,Chomsky presented a deeper,more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG),a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book,Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences,i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective,it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism,constructivism,empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism,nativism,rationalism and generativism,respectively,taking as its main object of study the abstract,inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.
Caroline Heycock is a Scottish syntactician and professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Bencie Woll FAAAS is an American–British linguist and scholar of sign language. She became the first professor of sign language in the United Kingdom when she was appointed Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies at City University,London in 1995. In 2005,she moved to University College London where she became Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies and Director of the Deafness,Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL).
Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli is a Greek linguist and Chair of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She is an associate editor of the journal Glossa and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2021.
Rudolf P. Botha is a South African linguist. He is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University and Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Utrecht University. Botha is best known for his works on the philosophy of linguistics.
Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.
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