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Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren (born 9 July 1934 in Haarlem, died 6 November 2021) was a Dutch linguist, emeritus professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen.
After finishing the St. Ignatius Gymnasium, Amsterdam, in 1951, he studied linguistics, together with classical languages and ancient history, at Amsterdam University from 1951 till 1958. He then taught Classics at a Junior College in Amsterdam till 1963. For a brief period he studied and worked under the guidance of the Amsterdam logician Evert Beth. This was followed by an assistantship at Groningen University, after which, in 1967, he was appointed as a lecturer in Linguistics at (Darwin College, Cambridge), where he stayed till 1970. In 1969 he obtained his PhD (Operators and Nucleus) at the University of Utrecht. From 1970 till 1974 he was lecturer in Linguistics at Oxford University (Magdalen College). From there he moved to Radboud University in Nijmegen as a professor of Philosophy of Language. In 1995 his chair was changed to Theoretical Linguistics.
After his retirement in 1999 he was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen. In 1982 he founded the Journal of Semantics . In 1988 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. [1] In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Glasgow University. During his career he fulfilled visiting professorships in Sydney, Amsterdam, Zürich, Glasgow, Oxford, Penang, Bern, Mannheim, Maceió, Porto Alegre, Leipzig, Vienna, Stellenbosch, Florianópolis.
As a linguist, Seuren took an independent position, opposing not only the linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky but also possible-world semantics and cognitivist linguistics, all of which he considered to be empirically and methodologically inadequate—the former two because they are overformalized and fail to take into account the natural ecological environment of human language, the third because of its ideologically motivated aversion to any explanation involving underlying rule-governed causal mechanisms. In his view, a grammar was an algorithmic top-down rule system transforming logico-semantic mental (propositional) structures into well-formed surface structures (1996). In a wider methodological perspective, he supported the view that in the study of language a balance should be kept between precise but informal analyses and descriptions on the one hand and full formalization on the other: formalize where you can but be content with less formal theorizing when full formalization is (as yet) impossible (2009).
His special fields of research were: the theory of grammar and meaning and their interrelations (1969, 1975, 1996, 2009); the role of logic (especially scope phenomena in language (1969, 1975, 1985, 2010)); the theory of "Semantic Syntax" (1996); the analysis of the notion of meaning (1975, 2009); the theory of semantic presupposition and the trivalent logic required by it (1975, 1985, 2010); the analysis of the context-dependency of sentences in discourse (1985, 2009, 2010); the development of a natural logic on the basis of the natural meanings of logical operators in language (2010).
Besides his work in theoretical linguistics, Seuren is known as a historian of linguistics (1998). From c. 1980 to c. 1995 he took an active interest in Creole languages, in particular the English-based Suriname Creole Sranan, for which he devised a now legally sanctioned orthography, and the French-based Creole of the Indian Ocean island Mauritius. In this context, he co-founded, in 1980, together with Herman Wekker, the IBS (Institute for the Advancement of Surinamese Studies) and the still flourishing Dutch-language periodical Oso (Sranan for 'house'). [2]
His seminal publications include:
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
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). Diverse approaches, such as generative grammar and functional grammar, offer unique perspectives on syntax, reflecting its complexity and centrality to understanding human language.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
Robert D. Van Valin Jr. is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists, tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition.
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.
The term predicate is used in two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other defines it as only the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition, the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake, while by the second definition, it is only the content verb likes, and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion.
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".
In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, to the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's grammar. The term is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute located on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. The institute was founded in 1980 by Dutch psycholinguist Pim Levelt and is dedicated exclusively to psycholinguistics. It is one of the few institutes of the Max Planck Society situated outside Germany. According to the ranking of Web of World Research Centers, the institute ranks second amongst all Max Planck Institutes (MPI) in terms of visibility and eighth in terms of size.
Jeroen van de Weijer is a Dutch linguist who teaches phonology, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and other courses at Shenzhen University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages. Before, he was Full Professor of English Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, in the School of English Studies.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
Willem Johannes Maria (Pim) Levelt is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is a researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, of which he has been a member since 1978.
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Noel Burton-Roberts is a British linguist and Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is known for work ranging over general and English linguistics: architecture of language, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and English grammar.
Aslı Özyürek is a linguist, cognitive scientist and psychologist. She is professor at the Center for Language Sciences and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen, and incoming Director of the Multimodal Language Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Logical grammar or rational grammar is a term used in the history and philosophy of linguistics to refer to certain linguistic and grammatical theories that were prominent until the early 19th century and later influenced 20th-century linguistic thought. These theories were developed by scholars and philosophers who sought to establish a logical and rational basis for understanding the relationship between reality, meaning, cognition, and language. Examples from the classical and modern period represent a realistic approach to linguistics, while accounts written during the Age of Enlightenment represent rationalism, focusing on human thought.
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