Stephen Robert Anderson (born 1943) [1] is an American linguist. He is the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Yale University and was the 2007 president of the Linguistic Society of America. [2]
He received a B.S. in linguistics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1966 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. Anderson taught at Harvard University from 1969 until 1975. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975. In 1988, he became a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. Since 1994, he has been at Yale University; he retired from teaching in 2017. [3] He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988–89. Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, [1] the Association for Psychological Science in 2006, and the Linguistic Society of America in 2008. He was an early member of Project Steve. From 2009 to 2013 he was Vice President of CIPL, the Permanent International Committee of Linguists. In January, 2014, he was awarded the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award of Linguistic Society of America. A festschrift in his honor on his retirement was edited in 2017 by Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn and Raffaella Zanuttini. [4]
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
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:
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference.
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.
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.
William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer known for his work on Sanskrit grammar and Vedic philology as well as his influential view of language as a social institution. He was the first president of the American Philological Association and editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary.
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: Language, the open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics, and the open access journal Phonological Data & Analysis. Its annual meetings, held every winter, foster discussion amongst its members through the presentation of peer-reviewed research, as well as conducting official business of the society. Since 1928, the LSA has offered training to linguists through courses held at its biennial Linguistic Institutes held in the summer. The LSA and its 3,600 members work to raise awareness of linguistic issues with the public and contribute to policy debates on issues including bilingual education and the preservation of endangered languages.
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris. In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semantic characteristics of language in separation from sociology, psychology or neurobiology, and has a high degree of logical rigour. Hjelmslev regarded linguistics – or glossematics – as a formal science. He was the inventor of formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.
Glossematics is a structuralist linguistic theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall although the two ultimately went separate ways each with their own approach. Hjelmslev's theory, most notably, is an early mathematical methodology for the analysis of language which was subsequently incorporated into the analytical foundation of current models of functional–structural grammar such as Danish Functional Grammar, Functional Discourse Grammar and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory likewise remains fundamental for modern semiotics.
Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.
Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski, was a linguist from the Russian Empire, most significant as the co-inventor of the concept of phonemes, and relative of Anya Lucia Kruszewski. From 1883, he was a professor at Kazan University. His notable works include On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883). The former is the introduction to his master's thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic and the latter is his doctoral thesis.
René de Saussure was a Swiss Esperantist and professional mathematician, who composed important works about Esperanto and interlinguistics from a linguistic viewpoint. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His chef d'oeuvre is an analysis on the logic of word construction in Esperanto, Fundamentaj reguloj de la vortteorio en Esperanto, defending the language against several Idist critiques. He developed the concept of neceso kaj sufiĉo by which he opposed the criticism of Louis Couturat that Esperanto lacks recursion.
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.
Eli Fischer-Jørgensen was a professor of phonetics at the University of Copenhagen and led the Institute for Phonetics. She was a member of the Danish resistance movement fighting against the German occupation of Denmark.
Hans Jørgen Uldall was a Danish linguist known for developing the linguistic theory of glossematics with Louis Hjelmslev.
Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.
The Kazan School of phonology was an influential group of linguists in Kazan. The linguistic circle included the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Mikołaj Kruszewski, Vasilii Alekseevich Bogoroditskii, Sergeĭ Konstantinovich Bulich, and Aleksandr Ivanovic Aleksandrov are usually considered members. Baudouin de Courtenay was the most prominent figure, but Kruszewski was also a significant factor in the movement, but died early, and was then frequently denigrated by Baudouin de Courtenay. The Kazan school influenced the Prague school.
Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.