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Information in this page copyright 2001 Brigham Young University Department of Linguistics. Permission to duplicate this material for non-commercial academic purposes is freely given, provided BYU is noted as the copyright holder.

This page last updated May 22, 2001 by Daniel Roundy, dqr@ttt.org

 		 

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People, A-H

| A-H | I-M | N-S | T-Z |

Abulafia

Abulafia was one of the best known figures in the study of Kabbalism. While the Greeks saw language as signifying the universe, the Hebrews saw language as being the universe. Kabbalism was a way of interpreting language, or the universe. In Abulafia's ecstatic kabbala, or kabbala of the names, language represented actual reality. Abulafia believed that God created the world with the actual 22 Hebrew letters themselves. Language was not simply a system of describing the world that exists, but rather was the very means of its existence. Abulafia did not believe that Hebrew was the first language, but that the Hebrew letters were the original letters. He believed any other letters found in other languages that weren't in the Hebrew alphabet were simply different pronunciations of Hebrew letters. Differences in languages came from differing combinations of these letters. Hebrew was not the automatic language a child would acquire if left alone with no language contact. Hebrew was a conventional language, the conventions of which had been established by God with the prophets. So, though Hebrew wasn't the first language, its conventions did fit with nature. Abulafia believed that people had forgotten their first language, and that Kabbalists had the responsibility to do as much as he could to find the original matrix of the world's languages, but that it would only be totally understood with the coming of the Messiah.

Information gathered from:

  • Eco, U. 1997. The Search for the Perfect Language. Translated by James Fentress. Series Title: The Making of Europe. Ed. J. Le Goff. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Austin, John

Born in Lancaster, England, John Austin is known for his contributions to the area of pragmatics. Austin received his education at Oxford. He was very well known in the field that later was known as Ordinary Language Philosophy. Austin studied especially how people use words for certain functions, such as orders, excuses, and judgments. His paper "A plea for excuses," is a very influential one in the area of Ordinary Language Philosophy. During WWII, Austin worked in the intelligence service for Great Britain. After the war, he returned to Oxford to spend the remainder of his life as a professor of philosophy. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, published after his death, was an application of Ordinary Language Philosophy which attacked logical empiricism and the sense-datum theory.

Austin's was also the first work done on Speech Acts Theory, before it was known as such. He compared performative utterances (such as "This meeting is adjourned."), which actually affect a change in the state of the world, to constatives (statements of fact), which simply describe the world. He suggested that these two types of speech acts should be evaluated differently-performatives by "felicity" and constatives by their "truth." He later revised this idea to include the concept that even constatives could be evaluated by felicity. Austin divided speech acts into three types-locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. Austin's How To Do Things With Words, also published after his death, was the culmination of his work in the area of speech act theory. J. R. Searle, who had worked under Austin, continued to develop the theory, but made several changes from Austin's previous work on points on which he did not agree.

Information gathered from:

  • Asher, R.E., Editor in Chief. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. New York: Pergamon Press.
  • "Austin, John Langshaw," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000. http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
  • Lonsdale, Deryle. (2000). Class Lecture--Linguistics 580R.
Bloomfield, Leonard

Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 1, 1887, and his family later moved to Wisconsin. He graduated with an A. B. from Harvard in 1906, and did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation on "A Semasiological Differentiation in Germanic Secondary Ablaut," finishing in 1909. Bloomfield spent a year teaching German at the University of Cincinnati before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois. He subsequently spent a year studying German in Leipzig and Gottingen. Upon returning to Illinois, he began to study Tagalog, trying to find ways of explaining it by what it was itself rather than with a comparison to Latin. He moved on to study American Indian languages, especially Algonkian, and was influential in promoting the study of these languages. Bloomfield was interested in reforming the way reading was taught in America. He was the main force behind the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, and participated actively in its conferences. He also prepared language learning materials for the US military during WWII. In 1940, he was called to become a Sterling Professor at Yale. He taught very little there because of a combination of his work for the military, the depression of his wife, and a stroke he suffered in 1946. However, during that time he did do a great deal of work in Russian and Dutch, published a study of Ilocano grammar, and did extensive work on Menomini. Leonard Bloomfield died on April 18, 1949.

Leonard Bloomfield's major works include An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914) and Language (1933). Bloomfield's ideas differed from the Port Royal school, because he sought to explain various languages by their own terminology, rather than try to fit all languages into the Latin mold. Contrary to the way he has been portrayed, Bloomfield did not leave meaning completely out of his study of linguistics. He was aware of the importance of meaning to the field, but did not integrate it into his scientific studies. He also used diachronic studies along with synchronic ones (again, something he has been portrayed as leaving out). His views on meaning (and on several other issues) changed throughout his life-his early work reflected the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt of a dualism between the actual world and a non-physical mind. Later, studying under Albert P. Weiss, he no longer felt the non-physical mind part was necessary to propose. In addition to these issues, in many other cases his views have been exaggerated, leading to a link of his name to views he did not actually have. This confusion, however, became less intense in the 1980's, leading to a more accurate view of Bloomfield's work.

Information gathered from:

Bresnan, Joan

In 1972, Joan Bresnan received her Ph.D. from MIT. She taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Amherst, and is currently a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. A former president of LSA, she has also taught at the Australian Linguistics Institutes; the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Linguistics; the Vilem Mathesius Lecture Series; and the University of Stuttgart Graduiertenkolleg Institut für Linguistik. Dr. Bresnan is also currently a member of the Executive Committee of the ILFGA.

Dr. Bresnan’s chief interests include syntactic theory, typology, and Optimality Theory. She is currently the Principal Investigator of Stanford’s Optimal Typology Project. Optimality Theory sees language as various sequences of various types of information, for example, categories, functions, and so on. In Optimality Theory, these sequences overlap each other to a certain extent, but not exactly. Dr. Bresnan is also interested in the Bantu languages and in Australian Aborigional Languages.

Information gathered from:

Boaz, Franz

Called The Father of American Linguistics by Harris and the founder of North American anthropology (as it is currently known) by Asher, Franz Boaz was born in Germany on July 9, 1858. He studied physics and geography at the University of Kiel, and earned his PhD in 1881. While doing fieldwork in Baffin Island, he began to be interested in anthropology. He worked at the University of Berlin for a year before he moved to the United States. He taught at Clark University and became very involved in the Chicago World's Fair organizing exhibits on anthropology. He began in earnest a study of the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, and other groups of Northwest Coast Indians. Boaz then joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he developed the top program in the USA for training professional anthropologists, the graduates of which held many top positions in the field in just a few years.

Boaz edited the Handbook of American Indian Languages (for the Bureau of American Ethnology). He realized that these languages were very different from those of the European tradition. He emphasized the importance of describing the Indian languages by categories of their own and not trying to make them fit into the Latin/European mold. Boaz put a lot of time and research into the collection of direct language data samples from native speakers of these languages. He and his students realized that a language was bound up very closely with the views of the world of its speakers. Boaz also suggested the compilation of a database of texts in the languages of native speakers that could be accessed by ethnologists and linguists alike. This view of the importance of linguistic studies to ethnology continued to be evident in succeeding generations of students. Boaz, however, didn't get very involved in historical linguistics. He saw it as impossible to distinguish between language similarities due to genetic relations and those due to borrowing, and so excluded the study of genetic relations in language from his work.

Information gathered from:

  • Asher, R.E., Editor in Chief. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. New York: Pergamon Press.
  • Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. The Linguistics WarsNew York: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, Noam

Born on Dec. 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky Received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and went on to teach at MIT. His first influential and controversial work was Syntactic Structures in 1957. Chomsky went in a much different direction from the American Structuralism that was prevelant in his time. While American Structuralism had been a break from the work of earlier linguistics, Chomsky broke with American Structuralism by going back to many of the older ideas that had been prevelant before it. Where American Structuralism placed semantics outside of the field of Linguistics, Chomsky at first shifted to it gradually, and in time considered it an integral part (as had linguists previously). Chomsky's concept of a Universal Grammar was a great contrast to the American Structuralist idea that there was too much difference between languages to try to group them under universals, but also went back to how linguists tried to study grammar before the American Structuralists. Other parts of Chomskyan linguistics actually weren't much different from American Structuralism. These included Chomsky's embracing a descriptive rather than a prescriptive grammar, as well as his trying to use as much as possible a scientifically verifiable approach to the study of grammar.

For Chomsky, syntax is a vital part of the field of linguistics. One of his main goals is to construct a Universal Grammar to explain how all language is constructed. He divides language into language competence, or I-language, which refers to our internal blueprint about how to use language, and language performance, or E-language, which refers to how we actually speak. Chomsky's Universal Grammar is based upon language competence. Chomsky's goal is not actually to explain how language is put together in the human brain, but to create a finite machine that can come up with all of the utterances that are acceptable in a language, and none of those that are not acceptable. Many others in current linguistics work have built either upon or away from Chomsky's ideas. Many in the field are very supportive of his work, others are bothered by certain aspects of his research, and some agree with very little of what he's done. Chomsky's work is influential (on one hand or the other) in many aspects of modern linguistics.

Information gathered from:

  • Haley, Michael C. & Lunsford, Ronald F. 1994. Noam Chomsky. New York: Twain Publishers.
  • Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. The Linguistics WarsNew York: Oxford University Press.
  • Melby, Alan. (class lecture--BYU)

 

 

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Descartes, Rene

Rene Descarte was born near Tours in 1596. He received his education at the Jesuit College of La Fleche. He did a great deal of work in many different areas, especially in science and in philosophy. He believed that the world had a mathematical base that was completely separate from human perception or understanding. Descartes also believed in the heliocentric hypothesis; however, he backed off and withdrew his work Le Monde that talked about it after the trial of Galileo. In addition to Le Monde, Descarte's works include Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence (late 1620's), Discourse on Method (1637), Meditations (1641), Principles of Philosophy (1644), and Passions of the Soul (1649).

Descarte's statement "I think, therefore I am" follows the principle that human beings know of their existence because they are able to think-because they have cognitive minds. Descarte divided the world into two categories-mind and matter. This concept of the two types of mind and matter is referred to as Cartesian Dualism, and shows up in many other fields as well. Language was very important to Descartes in this division. Descartes noted a definite difference between animal and human communication in relation to mind. He attested that although animals can also be taught to speak, it is only as an end to a specific means-to get a food reward, for example, and that they do not actually understand the words that they speak. Humans, in contrast, can respond differently to a variety of different utterances in a variety of different ways. (Descarte is seen to have influenced Chomsky's work because of his understanding of this principle; however, in Descarte's time, the understanding of it was still in very early stages.) Descarte realized that the difference between animal and human communication was not a physical one, due to the lack of or presence of speech organs. He made the comparison that people who are deaf or mute, although they may not have complete functioning organs to hear or speak, can still come up with genuine languages of signs. He suggested that the difference could not be explained physically, but was due to the "rational souls", or the mind, that people have as opposed to animals, which, he said, have very different souls (or minds). He suggested that people's speech abilities also could not be explained physically, or materially, because of their complexity and great variety in so many situations, and that those abilities, again, could be contributed only to the "rational soul," or the mind.

Information gathered from:

  • Asher, R.E., Editor in Chief. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. New York: Pergamon Press.
  • Marvin, C. (1995-2000). "Rene Descartes: Philosopher and Mathematician." The Window: Philosophy On The Internet: Philosophers Available: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/descartes.html
 

For the text and a translation of Descarte's Meditations, see Manley, D. B. & Taylor, C. S. (eds.)(1996). Descartes' Meditations: A Trilingual HTML Edition. Available: http://philos.wright.edu/Descartes/Meditations.html

Halle, Morris

Morris Halle was born in Latvia in 1923 and emigrated to the United States in 1940. He studied at the City College of New York from 1941 to 1943, at which time his studies went on hold until 1946 while he served in the United States Army during WWII. He earned his Master's Degree from Chicago in 1948, and studied under Roman Jakobson at Columbia from 1948-1949. He began teaching at MIT in 1951, where he continues today. Halle completed his PhD at Harvard in 1955, and he has been an active member of the Linguistic Society of America for many years. He is a close colleague of Noam Chomsky at MIT, and they share many ideas about Generative Grammar and related areas.

Halle's main emphasis has been the study of phonology, and his work in Generative Phonology has been very influential. His work has spanned to include studying phonological systems of specific languages and their relations to basic theoretical assumptions, and also studies of accent systems. Halle states that phonology is more than just producing and understanding sounds, but also includes an understanding about how our language links what we perceive and what we do. He also maintains that a good phonological system doesn't necessarily need to follow any presupposed principles or laws, but, more importantly, it needs to be insightful and easy to work with. These principles are similar to Edward Sapir's 1925 paper "Sound patterns in language," Roman Jakobson's research, and the rationalist philosophy of Noam Chomsky. However, Halle has taken research in the particular area of phonology much deeper than any of these colleagues had, and the students who are studying under him are also having a great impact the field.

Information gathered from:

  • Asher, R.E., Editor in Chief. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. New York: Pergamon Press.
  • Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. The Linguistics WarsNew York: Oxford University Press.
  • Tseng, Peter. Zellig S. Harris's Life and Work, Year-by-Year. Found on the World Wide Web, March 31, 2000. Available: http://www.arts.uwo.ca/chomsky/mit/zellig.html

Some helpful websites:

Harris, Zellig

Zellig Harris was born in Balta, Ukraine, on October 23, 1909, and came to the United States as a young child in 1913. He grew up in Philadelphia. Harris completed his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1930, and began teaching there the next year. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. there in 1934, and completed his doctorate in 1939. Harris later became influential in the Avukah, a Zionist student group on many college campuses. Harris was appointed as professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947. With this appointment, the first department of linguistics in the US was created. Harris' work in transformational grammar did much to spark Noam Chomsky's work in transformational-generative grammar, and in fact, in many ways, the work of Noam Chomsky in transformational grammar was a direct extension of the work of Harris. In addition, when Chomsky was first starting out in linguistics, Harris' reputation in the field was a help to the acceptance of Chomsky's early work, which made it possible for Chomsky's work to gain a hold in the field early on, before it was so strongly attacked. Zellig Harris was named to the endowed chair of the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Linguistics in 1966. In 1979, he retired from the University of Pennsylvania, but still continued to write and to publish until his death on May 21, 1992.

Harris first introduced the concept of transformational grammar in 1952. Transformations included rules of composition (that allow the two simple sentences "I have a truck" and "The truck is blue" to be combined into the sentence "I have a blue truck"), rules of changing word order or of forming negations and passives, and rules to delete repeated elements. Later in his research, Harris limited transformations to a much smaller set. Harris also divided grammar into the transformations part and the information-conveying part. The operator grammar took care of the information-conveying part of language, and the transformations were applied to make the sentence into something we could understand. Harris also came up with the idea of sublanguages of English. He pointed out that in technical domains in technical language, the language used is not just a subgrammar of English. Instead, it has its own transformations, etc. that are specific to its own area of focus.

Information gathered from:

  • Asher, R.E., Editor in Chief. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. New York: Pergamon Press.
  • Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. The Linguistics WarsNew York: Oxford University Press.
  • Tseng, Peter. Zellig S. Harris's Life and Work, Year-by-Year. Found on the World Wide Web, March 31, 2000. Available: http://www.arts.uwo.ca/chomsky/mit/zellig.html

 

Some helpful websites:

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