List: American linguists

by likeorhate

•  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist. Whorf is widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences thought. An important theme in many of his publications, he has been credited as one of the fathers of this approach, often referred to as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir.

  

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•  Charles F. Hockett

  Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century in Cornell and Rice universities.

  

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•  Edward Sapir

  Edward Sapir, (January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. He was one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

  

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•  Franz Boas

  Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography.

  

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•  Joseph Greenberg

  Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.

  

  28.6%
  

  42.9%
  

  28.6%
  
•  Kenneth Lee Pike

  Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912–December 31, 2000), also known during his life as Ken Pike, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics and coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic".

  

  33.3%
  

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•  Leonard Bloomfield

  Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.

  

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  45.0%
  
•  Noam Chomsky

  Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, polemicist and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.

  

  42.1%
  

  26.3%
  

  31.6%
  
•  Steven Pinker

  Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science, currently employed in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

  

  25.0%
  

  12.5%
  

  62.5%
  
•  George Lakoff

  George P. Lakoff (born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society.

  

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•  Dell Hymes

  Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, Portland, Oregon - November 13, 2009, Charlottesville, Virginia) was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics.

  

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•  John Goldsmith

  John Anton Goldsmith (born 1951) is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in Linguistics and Computer Science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics under Morris Halle in 1976. He was on the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, before joining the University of Chicago in 1984.

  

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•  M. A. R. Barker

  Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker (born November 3, 1930 as Phillip Barker) is a retired professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies who created one of the first roleplaying games, Empire of the Petal Throne, and has authored several fantasy/science fantasy novels based in his associated world setting of Tékumel.

  

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•  Paul Pimsleur

  Paul Pimsleur (October 17, 1927 – June 22, 1976) was an authority in the field of applied linguistics. Pimsleur grew up in New York City and earned a bachelor's degree at the City College of New York and a Ph.D. in French and a master's degree in psychological statistics from Columbia University. His first position involved teaching French phonetics and phonemics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  

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•  Jean Berko Gleason

  Jean Berko Gleason is a Boston University psycholinguist best known for having created the Wug Test. The test, which was designed to investigate the manner in which children acquire grammatical understanding, was created in 1958. It remains significant in the realms of linguistics and cognitive development.

  

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•  Stephen Krashen

  Stephen Krashen is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, who moved from the linguistics department to the faculty of the School of Education in 1994. He is a linguist, educational researcher, and activist.

  

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•  Marc Okrand

  Marc Okrand (born 1948) is an American linguist and is most notable as the creator of the Klingon language.

  

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•  Stephen Pearl Andrews

  Stephen Pearl Andrews (22 March 1812 – 21 May 1886) was an American individualist anarchist and author of several books on the topic.

  

  35.7%
  

  35.7%
  

  28.6%
  
•  Morris Swadesh

  Morris Swadesh (January 22, 1909 - July 20, 1967) was an influential and controversial American linguist who applied a basic concept in linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas. Changes in language occur over centuries, the best known example being the shift from Latin to the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) that occurred in Europe in less than 2000 years.

  

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•  John Grinder

  John Grinder Ph.D. is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with the co-creation with Richard Bandler of the field of Neuro-linguistic programming. He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc. , a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987 (Grinder joined in 1989). Grinder and Bostic St. Clair also run workshops and seminars on NLP internationally.

  

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•  Adele Goldberg (linguist)

  Adele Eva Goldberg (born November 9, 1963) is a researcher in the field of linguistics. Since 2004, she has been a Professor in Linguistics, and an associated faculty in Psychology at Princeton University. From 1997-2004, she was an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She was also, from 1997 to 1998, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

  

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•  Deborah Tannen

  Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C..

  

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•  Zellig Harris

  Zellig Sabbettai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language, all achieved in the first 10 years of his career and published within the first 25.

  

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•  William Labov

  William Labov is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology.

  

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•  Robert W. Young

  Robert W. Young (May 18, 1912 – February 20, 2007), professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico, was an American linguist known for his work on the Navajo language. With Navajo scholar William Morgan, Young compiled the monumental The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary, a dictionary accompanied by a 400-page grammar "sketch". Young, Morgan and Sally Midgette also produced the Analytical Lexicon of Navajo, which organizes the lexicon by root.

  

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