Frederick Newmeyer
Encyclopedia
Frederick J. Newmeyer (born January 30, 1944) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics
at the University of Washington
and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia
Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University
Department of Linguistics. He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax and is best known for his work on the history of generative syntax
and for his arguments that linguistic formalism (i.e. generative grammar) and linguistic functionalism are not incompatible, but rather complementary. In the early 1990s he was one of the linguists who helped to renew interest in the evolutionary origin of language
. More recently, Newmeyer had argued that facts about linguistic typology
are better explained by parsing
constraints than by the principles and parameters
model of grammar. Nevertheless, he has continued to defend the basic principles of generative grammar, arguing that Ferdinand de Saussure
's langue/parole distinction as well Noam Chomsky
's distinction between linguistic competence
and linguistic performance
are essentially correct.
. He received his BA in geology from the University of Rochester
in 1965 and his MA in linguistics from that same institution two years later. Newmeyer was awarded a Ph. D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois in 1969, writing a dissertation entitled English Aspectual Verbs under the direction of Robert B. Lees. His only permanent position has been in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington (from 1969 until his retirement in 2006), but he has held visiting positions at a variety of universities around the world, including the University of Edinburgh
, Wayne State University
, University of London
, Cornell University
, University of Maryland
, UCLA, Latrobe University, Universidade de São Paulo, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Universiteit van Tilburg
, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, École Normale Supérieure
, Institut des Science Cognitives, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
, and University of Ljubljana
. In 2002, Newmeyer was President of the Linguistic Society of America
, from 2003-2006 Howard and Frances Nostrand Professor of Linguistics at Washington, and in 2006 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
and the Linguistic Society of America. In his 20s and 30s Newmeyer was heavily involved in left politics, being an active member of Students for a Democratic Society
in the late 1960s and of the International Socialists
from 1971 to 1977. He was married to Carolyn Platt between 1968 and 1973 and in 1993 he married Marilyn Goebel, who managed the internal web pages for Group Health Cooperative
in Seattle before her retirement in 2003. In 2006, he and Goebel moved to Vancouver
.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University is a Canadian public research university in British Columbia with its main campus on Burnaby Mountain in Burnaby, and satellite campuses in Vancouver and Surrey. The main campus in Burnaby, located from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and has more than 34,000...
Department of Linguistics. He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax and is best known for his work on the history of generative syntax
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
and for his arguments that linguistic formalism (i.e. generative grammar) and linguistic functionalism are not incompatible, but rather complementary. In the early 1990s he was one of the linguists who helped to renew interest in the evolutionary origin of language
Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
. More recently, Newmeyer had argued that facts about linguistic typology
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
are better explained by parsing
Parsing
In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...
constraints than by the principles and parameters
Principles and parameters
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off...
model of grammar. Nevertheless, he has continued to defend the basic principles of generative grammar, arguing that Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's langue/parole distinction as well Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
's distinction between linguistic competence
Linguistic competence
Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language, it is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance, the way the language system is used in communication...
and linguistic performance
Linguistic performance
In linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...
are essentially correct.
Biography
Newmeyer was born in Philadelphia, but grew up in Port Washington, New YorkPort Washington, New York
Port Washington is a hamlet and census-designated place in Nassau County, New York on the North Shore of Long Island. As of the United States 2010 Census, the community population was 15,846....
. He received his BA in geology from the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
in 1965 and his MA in linguistics from that same institution two years later. Newmeyer was awarded a Ph. D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois in 1969, writing a dissertation entitled English Aspectual Verbs under the direction of Robert B. Lees. His only permanent position has been in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington (from 1969 until his retirement in 2006), but he has held visiting positions at a variety of universities around the world, including the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
, Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...
, University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
, Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, University of Maryland
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
, UCLA, Latrobe University, Universidade de São Paulo, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Universiteit van Tilburg
Universiteit van Tilburg
Tilburg University is an academic institution of higher education, specialising in the social sciences and law, located in Tilburg in the southern part of the Netherlands....
, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, École Normale Supérieure
École Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
, Institut des Science Cognitives, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network....
, and University of Ljubljana
University of Ljubljana
The University of Ljubljana is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. With 64,000 enrolled graduate and postgraduate students, it is among the largest universities in Europe.-Beginnings:...
. In 2002, Newmeyer was President of the Linguistic Society of America
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
, from 2003-2006 Howard and Frances Nostrand Professor of Linguistics at Washington, and in 2006 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
and the Linguistic Society of America. In his 20s and 30s Newmeyer was heavily involved in left politics, being an active member of Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
in the late 1960s and of the International Socialists
International Socialists
International Socialists is the name of a number of Trotskyist organizations.Most organisations using this name are in the International Socialist Tendency...
from 1971 to 1977. He was married to Carolyn Platt between 1968 and 1973 and in 1993 he married Marilyn Goebel, who managed the internal web pages for Group Health Cooperative
Group Health Cooperative
Group Health Cooperative, more commonly known as Group Health, is a Seattle, Washington based nonprofit healthcare organization. Established in 1947, it today provides coverage and care for about 700,000 people in Washington and Idaho and is one of the largest private employers in Washington...
in Seattle before her retirement in 2003. In 2006, he and Goebel moved to Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
.
Books Written
- 2005. Possible and Probable Languages: A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1998. Language Form and Language Function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 1996. Generative Linguistics: A Historical Perspective. London: Routledge.
- 1986. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Japanese translation 1994, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten Publishers. Arabic translation 1997, Abha (Saudi Arabia): The Literary Club. Persian translation 2002, Ney (Iran).
- 1983. Grammatical Theory: Its Limits and Its Possibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malay translation 1996, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
- 1980. Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter Century of Transformational Generative Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Second edition 1986. First edition translated into Spanish 1982, Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Translations of second edition: Korean 1995, Seoul: Kul Press. Chinese 1998, Taipei: Crane Publishing Co, Ltd.; Japanese translation under contract.
- 1975. English Aspectual Verbs. The Hague: Mouton and Company.
Books Edited
- 1998. Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics (with Michael Darnell, Edith Moravcsik, Michael Noonan, and Kathleen Wheatley). Studies in Language Companion Series, Volume 41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Volume I: General Papers.
- Volume II: Case Studies.
- 1988. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spanish translation published 1990-1992 as Panorama de la Lingüística Moderna, Madrid:Visor Distribuciones.
- Volume I: Linguistic Theory: Foundations.
- Volume II: Linguistic Theory: Extensions and Implications.
- Volume III: Language: Psychological and Biological Aspects.
- Volume IV: Language: The Socio-Cultural Context.
- 1986. A Festschrift for Sol Saporta (with Michael Brame and Heles Contreras). Linguistic Research Monograph Series Publication. Seattle: Noit Amrofer Press.