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语言学名家简介
1. F. de Saussure (1857—1913)
Ferdinand de Saussure was a great Swiss linguist at the turn of the 20th
century. Though he was enormously influential as a teacher, lecturing at the
École des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of
Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901—1913) and of general
linguistics (1907—1913) at the University of Geneva, he did not ideas published during his lifetime because of his persistent for
perfection. Three years after his death, a compilation of notes on his by two of his students. Bally and Sechehaye, was published with the title the Course in Linguistics, which soon became the most influential linguistic works at that time.
— “parole”, the speech of the individual person, and “langue”“langue” rather than “parole”methodological orientation of language research have widely accepted that he is generally regarded as the father of
—1943)
Otto Jespersen was an internationally influential Danish linguist. He
was
born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen
University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin. He also studied
linguistics at Oxford.
Jespersen was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from
1893 to 1925. Along with Paul Passy, he was a founder of the International
Phonetic Association. He was a vocal supporter and active developer of artificial international languages such as Esperanto. He was also involved in the delegation that created the artificial language Ido and later developed the Novial language, which he considered an improvement.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
He was most widely recognized for some of his books. His monumental work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles concentrated on morphology and syntax. His Growth and Structure of the English Language is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, over 60 years after his death and nearly 100 years after publication.
More than once he was invited to the U. S. as a guest lecturer, and he took occasion to study the country‟s educational system. As a foremost authority on English grammar, he helped to revolutionize language teaching in Europe.
3. YR Chao (1892—1982)
Chao Yuen Ren（赵元任），Chao went to the United States with a in 1910 to study
he taught at the California, Berkeley. He retired in 1962 with the title Professor ‟s journal, Language, was dedicated to him in 1966. Chao went back China and the USA, and was warmly welcomed by Premier Zhou Enlai and Beijing University. Chao passed away on Feburary 24, 1982.
Chao published prolifically on language research, the most influential of which is A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968). Besides English, Chao could speak German, French, and Japanese. He was the interpreter of the renowned British philosopher Bertrand Russell when he visited China in 1920, and they became lifelong friends since then. Chao was also an excellent composer. His composition How could I help thinking of her (教我如何不想她) was a “pop hit” in the 1930s in China. The lyrics were written by Liu Bannong (刘半农)，another linguist who invented the Chinese feminine pronoun 她. His love of music brought him sensitive ears
to
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com sounds and tones, which was very helpful for his phonological and dialectological study.
In the 1920s, Chao joined the initial work of shaping Gwoyeu Romatzyh (国语罗马字)，but, as a gifted punster, he also wrote the essay the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, which consisted of 92 characters all with the sound shi (though in the four different tones of Mandarin), and was incomprehensible when romanized.
4. L. Bloomfield (1887—1949)
when
his most important work, Language, was published—Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, in graduated from
Harvard College at the age of 19 and did 2 years at the
the University of Chicago in 1909.
After teaching German at the University for a year, Bloomfield became Illinois, where he 1949.
‟s concept of language structure. Influenced by the behaviorist A. P. Weiss whom he met when he worked at Ohio State University,
The period from the publication of Language in 1933 to the mid-1950s is commonly called the “Bloomfieldian era” of linguistics. His masterpiece Language (1933) is a standard text. It had a profound influence on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that became axiomatic, notably that language stubby must always be centered in the spoken language, as against documents; that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language, not on the meaning of the forms; and that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that exist independently of the past—so that the history of a form does not explain its actual meaning.
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Though Bloomfield‟s particular methodology of descriptive linguistics was not widely accepted, his mechanistic attitudes toward a precise science of linguistics, dealing only with observable phenomena, were most influential. For a long period most American linguists considered themselves in some sense Bloomfield‟s disciples, whether they actually studied under him or not, and a great deal of American linguistic work has taken the form of working out questions raised and methods suggested by Bloomfield. His influence waned after the 1950s, when adherence to logical positivist doctrines lessened and there was a return to more mentalistic attitudes.
5. N. Chomsky (1928—)
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). with the
creation of the theory of generative the most
significant contribution to the field of linguistics of the 20th
his review of B. F. Skinner‟s Behavior, which challenged the
behaviorist approach to the study of Harvard University Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation Analysis”. According to his theory, utterances have a syntax by a formal grammar, in particular, a context-free grammar to grammar, The Principles and Parameters approach (1979) make strong claims retarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world‟s languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain.
Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U. S. foreign policy. He is one of America‟s most prominent political dissidents, authoring over 30 political books dissecting such issues as U. S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
6. C. Fillmore (1929—)
Charles J Fillmore is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph. D. in Linguistics
from the University of Michigan in 1961. Professor Fillmore spent ten years
at the Ohio State University before joining Berkeley‟s Department of
Linguistics in 1971, He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences. His research has concentrated on
of linguistic form and matters of meaning and use.
in collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff, into the theory of Construction Grammar.
His current major project is called ). It is a wide-ranging on-line description of the In this project, words are described in semantic and syntactic relations, in a database organized by both lexical items and Frames. The project is 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to it. It inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages,
—1971)
Richard Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.
His research focused on the foundations of logic and set theory. Though not a
professional linguist, Montague exercised a major influence on semantics in
the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of the first people to systematically explore
the possibilities of a completely rigorous formal analysis of both the syntax
and the semantics of natural languages along the lines of logic. His seminal
works on language between 1970 and 1973 founded the theory known after his death as Montague Grammar, one of the main starting points for the field of formal semantics.
Montague was born September 20, 1930 in Stockton, California and died March 7, 1971 in Los Angeles. At St. Mary‟s High School in Stockton he studied Latin and Ancient Greek. After a
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com year at Stockton Junior College studying journalism, he entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1948, where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Semitic languages, and graduated with an A. B. in philosophy in 1950. He continued graduate work at Berkeley, receiving an M. A. in mathematics in 1953 and his Ph. D. in Philosophy in 1957. Alfred Tarski, one of the pioneers in the model-theoretic semantics of logic, was Montague‟s main influence and directed his dissertation. Montague taught in the philosophy Department of the University of California, Los Angeles from 1955 until his death.
Montague‟s work constitutes a decisive breakaway from the traditional view that natural languages are too vague and too unsystematic to be treated formally, in the same way therefore, a formal semantics might also prove to be a possibility.
Although the work in generative linguistics thus constituted impetus for the people like Montague and Davidson were of the not just the syntax but also the far from common among generative linguists. Montague‟Lewis, Cresswell and many characteristics, which to a greater or lesser degree distinguish it from the are, first of all, the generality and rigor with which Montague carried out second, his ample use of whatever logical machinery he
—)
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar
(which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics (SFL)). In
addition to English, the model has been applied to other languages, both
Indo-European and non-Indo-European.
Michael Halliday was born in Yorkshire, England in 1925. He was
trained in Chinese for war service with the British army. Meanwhile he took a BA Honors degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) at the University of London, then studied for three years at Peking University and Lingnan University in China, and returned to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge. Having taught Chinese for a number of years, he changed his
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com field of specialization to linguistics, and developed systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of influential European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague School. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961. He became Professor of General Linguistics at the University College London in 1965. In 1976 he moved to Australia as Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired. He has worked in various regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practice of education. He received the status of
Ever since Halliday started thinking about language, his main interest has in “meaning”human mind and is simply waiting for a linguist to describe it; but is an open
9. L. Wittgenstein (1889—1951)
Ludwig of the most original and influential philosophers
of He was by birth an Austrian of Jewish
descent. He of his early education at home before studying
and Manchester, which led to an interest in pure
and the philosophy of mathematics. In 1912 he moved to
led to the Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in Germany in his release after the war he gave away a considerable fortune he had was first stated in the Blue and Brown Books, a set of lecture notes from 1933-35 and published posthumously in 1985, and later in his Philosophical Investigations (Published in 1953). He became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1939, succeeding G. E. Moore. In 1947 he resigned to devote himself to research, but his health soon deteriorated and he died of cancer in 1951.
The Tractatus, the definitive account of his earlier views, is a modern classic of philosophy. He states that the world consists entirely of independent, simple facts out of which complex ones are constructed. Language has as its purpose the stating of facts by picturing these facts.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com Wittgenstein‟s later philosophy is given in the Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. The basis of the new approach is a new view of language; the old view in the Tractatus that there is in principle a perfect language is abandoned and language is seen as a set of social activities, each serving a different kind of purpose. Each different way of using language is a “language game” which we learn by training in childhood.
Wittgenstein has had a great influence on modern philosophy and linguistics. His earlier views had great influence on logical positivism, and from his later views grew a new branch of language study—pragmatics.
10. S. Pinker (1954—)
Steven Pinker is one of the world‟Pinker was born in He studied experimental
psychology at McGill University University, where he earned
his PhD in psychology.
New York Times, Time, and Slate,The Language Instinct, His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Early and another prize from the American Psychological Association.
said, “”
biologists direct focus on a few „model organisms‟. Currently, our group is studying inflectional morphology: the ability to derive walked from walk or mice from mouse, We are aiming for a unified theory and an extensive database of how the system works computationally, how it is learned, how it varies across languages, how it is used in language production and comprehension, and how it is represented in the brain… We study people with neurological and genetic language and memory disorders (aphasia, Alzheimer‟s, specific language impairment), gathering evidence on how the different cognitive and linguistic modules underlying morphology might dissociate.”
“On the theoretical side, I have used linguistic and psycholinguistic data to develop
a
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com comprehensive model of the acquisition of grammar and lexicon, and to analyze issues such as the role of symbolic and connectionist computational architectures in language, the evolution of human language, and the nature of conceptual categories.”
11. W. Labov (1927—)
William Labov is a professor in the Linguistics Department of the
University of Pennsylvania. He is widely regarded as the founder of the
discipline of quantitative sociolinguistics and pursues research in
sociolinguistics and dialectology.
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he studied at Harvard and
worked as an industrial chemist (1949—taking his PhD at Columbia University (1963). He taught at —1970) before becoming a professor of linguistics at the University of and then became director of the university‟his study of the varieties of English spoken in published as The Social Stratification of English in New York Citythe late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard but respected as a with its own grammatical rules, although speakers of AAsociety at large.
“ „What is success?‟s of the questions that I asked people in the first linguistic ‟s figuring out what you want to do, and then getting you to do it. Another man said it‟s making use of everything that ever ‟ve wasted your time, you‟ve been ‟ve been doing since, I seem to have been following all three ideas the same time, so they may turn out to be the same idea after all.”
12. EH Lenneberg (1921—1975)
Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology more generally about innateness. His book Biological Foundations of Language
(1967) was a major landmark. This book collected the biological literature to support
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com the pivotal claim that language is founded on species-specific anatomical and neurophysiological capabilities for language, and that those elements are found only in humans. Lenneberg pointed out that language is an example of maturationally controlled behavior, which is preprogrammed to emerge at a particular stage, i. e. a critical period, in an individual‟s life, provided the surrounding environment is normal, such as seals walking. His book has been widely accepted because of its clear explanation for difficulties in second language learning after puberty. It explains well our experience of seeing small children speak foreign languages quite naturally.
Lennerberg was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Son of a physician, he grew up in an Ann Harbor as a professor in psychology.
His 1964 paper The Capacity of Language Acquisition sets forth the arguments The Language Instinct.
His work reveals that between the ages of two and language emerges by an teens the possibility for primary language to be good; the individual as if it had set it its ways basic skills not acquired by that time usually remain deficient for life.
Stephen D. Krashen is Professor Emeritus of Learning and Instruction at
the University of Southern California. He is an expert in the field of
linguistics, specializing in theories of language acquisition and
development. Much of his research had involved the study of non-English
and bilingual language acquisition. Recently Dr. Krashen‟s research has
focused on reading and its effects on language acquisition and academic
success. In the late 1970s, Stephen Krashen began promoting the “natural approach” to language teaching, which he laid out in a landmark text he co-wrote with Tracy Terrell. His ideas about the difference between learning and acquisition have strongly influenced the field of English as a second language (ESL) for several decades. He has published hundreds of books and articles and has been invited to deliver over 500 lectures at universities throughout the United States and the
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com rest of the world. In the past five years, Stephen Krashen has fought to save whole language and bilingual education in the United States and, more recently, has been lobbying for “recreational reading” and better stocked school libraries because of research relating both to higher achievement.
14. JH Greenberg (1915—2001)
Joseph Harold Greenberg‟s stubby of both the structure of language
and the similarities between different languages gained him recognition. In the first part of his career, Greenberg of language structure that excited the entire world.
old.
Greenberg did his PhD in anthropology at University under the Africanist forces communications. This may him too, for after the war he moved into
thousands In some ways it was like reverse-engineering the Genesis story of the ‟s project should seem so Greenberg‟s method was to compare languages multilaterally — painstaking comparisons based on phonology, the way words sound; semantics, what words mean; grammar, the way words are put together to form meaningful messages; all in the light of information extrinsic to language— archaeology, genetics, and history. His most important tool was a list of 300 words which he felt constituted a sort of core to any language. This included words like pronouns, nouns for body parts, family members, and the like. The theory is that such words are less prone to change than others. Since they change less often, they are a good way to tell whether languages are related.
In 1966 he published
Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com Meaningful Elements. In this article he offered 45 universals of word order and inflectional categories based on data from some 30 languages. He was among the first to deal with “implicational” universals (of the form “If A, then B”). He also edited Universals of Language (1963) and the four-volume Universals of Hunan Language (1978).
Greenberg dreamed of deep unity, and he spent an extremely long career pursuing evidence for it. Always a hard worker and prodigious publisher, his ambition seemed only to grow after retirement. He was still publishing highly technical evidence when he died, at age 85. On his deathbed he told a colleague that his biggest regret was that he had never gotten around to studying the languages of Southeast Asia.
15. H. Widdowson
Henry. Gof which are on other (though such as discourse analysis
and critical discourse analysis, spread of English, English for
Special Purposes and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Language
Teaching and Learning calls him “century for international ESOL”.
‟s College of Cambridge University, and spent University of from 1993—1998 was also concurrently Professor of Applied at the Vienna. He retired from teaching in 2001 and is now Professor Emeritus, London, and Honorary Professor, University of Vienna. He is a prolific author of of two series of works for Oxford University Press: Oxford Introductions to Language Study and, in conjunction with Chris Candlin: Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education. His books include: Teaching Language as Communication (1978); two volumes of Explorations in Applied Linguistics (1979, 1984); Aspects of Language Teaching (1990); Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry (1992); Linguistics (1996) and Defining Issues in English Language Teaching (2003).
His most recent book is entitled Test, Context, Pretex: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis (2004), published by Blackwell‟s.
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中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
语言学名家简介
1. F. de Saussure (1857—1913)
Ferdinand de Saussure was a great Swiss linguist at the turn of the 20th
century. Though he was enormously influential as a teacher, lecturing at the
École des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of
Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901—1913) and of general
linguistics (1907—1913) at the University of Geneva, he did not ideas published during his lifetime because of his persistent for
perfection. Three years after his death, a compilation of notes on his by two of his students. Bally and Sechehaye, was published with the title the Course in Linguistics, which soon became the most influential linguistic works at that time.
— “parole”, the speech of the individual person, and “langue”“langue” rather than “parole”methodological orientation of language research have widely accepted that he is generally regarded as the father of
—1943)
Otto Jespersen was an internationally influential Danish linguist. He
was
born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen
University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin. He also studied
linguistics at Oxford.
Jespersen was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from
1893 to 1925. Along with Paul Passy, he was a founder of the International
Phonetic Association. He was a vocal supporter and active developer of artificial international languages such as Esperanto. He was also involved in the delegation that created the artificial language Ido and later developed the Novial language, which he considered an improvement.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
He was most widely recognized for some of his books. His monumental work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles concentrated on morphology and syntax. His Growth and Structure of the English Language is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, over 60 years after his death and nearly 100 years after publication.
More than once he was invited to the U. S. as a guest lecturer, and he took occasion to study the country‟s educational system. As a foremost authority on English grammar, he helped to revolutionize language teaching in Europe.
3. YR Chao (1892—1982)
Chao Yuen Ren（赵元任），Chao went to the United States with a in 1910 to study
he taught at the California, Berkeley. He retired in 1962 with the title Professor ‟s journal, Language, was dedicated to him in 1966. Chao went back China and the USA, and was warmly welcomed by Premier Zhou Enlai and Beijing University. Chao passed away on Feburary 24, 1982.
Chao published prolifically on language research, the most influential of which is A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968). Besides English, Chao could speak German, French, and Japanese. He was the interpreter of the renowned British philosopher Bertrand Russell when he visited China in 1920, and they became lifelong friends since then. Chao was also an excellent composer. His composition How could I help thinking of her (教我如何不想她) was a “pop hit” in the 1930s in China. The lyrics were written by Liu Bannong (刘半农)，another linguist who invented the Chinese feminine pronoun 她. His love of music brought him sensitive ears
to
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com sounds and tones, which was very helpful for his phonological and dialectological study.
In the 1920s, Chao joined the initial work of shaping Gwoyeu Romatzyh (国语罗马字)，but, as a gifted punster, he also wrote the essay the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, which consisted of 92 characters all with the sound shi (though in the four different tones of Mandarin), and was incomprehensible when romanized.
4. L. Bloomfield (1887—1949)
when
his most important work, Language, was published—Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, in graduated from
Harvard College at the age of 19 and did 2 years at the
the University of Chicago in 1909.
After teaching German at the University for a year, Bloomfield became Illinois, where he 1949.
‟s concept of language structure. Influenced by the behaviorist A. P. Weiss whom he met when he worked at Ohio State University,
The period from the publication of Language in 1933 to the mid-1950s is commonly called the “Bloomfieldian era” of linguistics. His masterpiece Language (1933) is a standard text. It had a profound influence on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that became axiomatic, notably that language stubby must always be centered in the spoken language, as against documents; that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language, not on the meaning of the forms; and that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that exist independently of the past—so that the history of a form does not explain its actual meaning.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
Though Bloomfield‟s particular methodology of descriptive linguistics was not widely accepted, his mechanistic attitudes toward a precise science of linguistics, dealing only with observable phenomena, were most influential. For a long period most American linguists considered themselves in some sense Bloomfield‟s disciples, whether they actually studied under him or not, and a great deal of American linguistic work has taken the form of working out questions raised and methods suggested by Bloomfield. His influence waned after the 1950s, when adherence to logical positivist doctrines lessened and there was a return to more mentalistic attitudes.
5. N. Chomsky (1928—)
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). with the
creation of the theory of generative the most
significant contribution to the field of linguistics of the 20th
his review of B. F. Skinner‟s Behavior, which challenged the
behaviorist approach to the study of Harvard University Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation Analysis”. According to his theory, utterances have a syntax by a formal grammar, in particular, a context-free grammar to grammar, The Principles and Parameters approach (1979) make strong claims retarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world‟s languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain.
Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U. S. foreign policy. He is one of America‟s most prominent political dissidents, authoring over 30 political books dissecting such issues as U. S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com
6. C. Fillmore (1929—)
Charles J Fillmore is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph. D. in Linguistics
from the University of Michigan in 1961. Professor Fillmore spent ten years
at the Ohio State University before joining Berkeley‟s Department of
Linguistics in 1971, He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences. His research has concentrated on
of linguistic form and matters of meaning and use.
in collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff, into the theory of Construction Grammar.
His current major project is called ). It is a wide-ranging on-line description of the In this project, words are described in semantic and syntactic relations, in a database organized by both lexical items and Frames. The project is 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to it. It inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages,
—1971)
Richard Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.
His research focused on the foundations of logic and set theory. Though not a
professional linguist, Montague exercised a major influence on semantics in
the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of the first people to systematically explore
the possibilities of a completely rigorous formal analysis of both the syntax
and the semantics of natural languages along the lines of logic. His seminal
works on language between 1970 and 1973 founded the theory known after his death as Montague Grammar, one of the main starting points for the field of formal semantics.
Montague was born September 20, 1930 in Stockton, California and died March 7, 1971 in Los Angeles. At St. Mary‟s High School in Stockton he studied Latin and Ancient Greek. After a
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com year at Stockton Junior College studying journalism, he entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1948, where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Semitic languages, and graduated with an A. B. in philosophy in 1950. He continued graduate work at Berkeley, receiving an M. A. in mathematics in 1953 and his Ph. D. in Philosophy in 1957. Alfred Tarski, one of the pioneers in the model-theoretic semantics of logic, was Montague‟s main influence and directed his dissertation. Montague taught in the philosophy Department of the University of California, Los Angeles from 1955 until his death.
Montague‟s work constitutes a decisive breakaway from the traditional view that natural languages are too vague and too unsystematic to be treated formally, in the same way therefore, a formal semantics might also prove to be a possibility.
Although the work in generative linguistics thus constituted impetus for the people like Montague and Davidson were of the not just the syntax but also the far from common among generative linguists. Montague‟Lewis, Cresswell and many characteristics, which to a greater or lesser degree distinguish it from the are, first of all, the generality and rigor with which Montague carried out second, his ample use of whatever logical machinery he
—)
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar
(which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics (SFL)). In
addition to English, the model has been applied to other languages, both
Indo-European and non-Indo-European.
Michael Halliday was born in Yorkshire, England in 1925. He was
trained in Chinese for war service with the British army. Meanwhile he took a BA Honors degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) at the University of London, then studied for three years at Peking University and Lingnan University in China, and returned to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge. Having taught Chinese for a number of years, he changed his
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com field of specialization to linguistics, and developed systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of influential European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague School. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961. He became Professor of General Linguistics at the University College London in 1965. In 1976 he moved to Australia as Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired. He has worked in various regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practice of education. He received the status of
Ever since Halliday started thinking about language, his main interest has in “meaning”human mind and is simply waiting for a linguist to describe it; but is an open
9. L. Wittgenstein (1889—1951)
Ludwig of the most original and influential philosophers
of He was by birth an Austrian of Jewish
descent. He of his early education at home before studying
and Manchester, which led to an interest in pure
and the philosophy of mathematics. In 1912 he moved to
led to the Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in Germany in his release after the war he gave away a considerable fortune he had was first stated in the Blue and Brown Books, a set of lecture notes from 1933-35 and published posthumously in 1985, and later in his Philosophical Investigations (Published in 1953). He became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1939, succeeding G. E. Moore. In 1947 he resigned to devote himself to research, but his health soon deteriorated and he died of cancer in 1951.
The Tractatus, the definitive account of his earlier views, is a modern classic of philosophy. He states that the world consists entirely of independent, simple facts out of which complex ones are constructed. Language has as its purpose the stating of facts by picturing these facts.
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com Wittgenstein‟s later philosophy is given in the Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. The basis of the new approach is a new view of language; the old view in the Tractatus that there is in principle a perfect language is abandoned and language is seen as a set of social activities, each serving a different kind of purpose. Each different way of using language is a “language game” which we learn by training in childhood.
Wittgenstein has had a great influence on modern philosophy and linguistics. His earlier views had great influence on logical positivism, and from his later views grew a new branch of language study—pragmatics.
10. S. Pinker (1954—)
Steven Pinker is one of the world‟Pinker was born in He studied experimental
psychology at McGill University University, where he earned
his PhD in psychology.
New York Times, Time, and Slate,The Language Instinct, His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Early and another prize from the American Psychological Association.
said, “”
biologists direct focus on a few „model organisms‟. Currently, our group is studying inflectional morphology: the ability to derive walked from walk or mice from mouse, We are aiming for a unified theory and an extensive database of how the system works computationally, how it is learned, how it varies across languages, how it is used in language production and comprehension, and how it is represented in the brain… We study people with neurological and genetic language and memory disorders (aphasia, Alzheimer‟s, specific language impairment), gathering evidence on how the different cognitive and linguistic modules underlying morphology might dissociate.”
“On the theoretical side, I have used linguistic and psycholinguistic data to develop
a
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com comprehensive model of the acquisition of grammar and lexicon, and to analyze issues such as the role of symbolic and connectionist computational architectures in language, the evolution of human language, and the nature of conceptual categories.”
11. W. Labov (1927—)
William Labov is a professor in the Linguistics Department of the
University of Pennsylvania. He is widely regarded as the founder of the
discipline of quantitative sociolinguistics and pursues research in
sociolinguistics and dialectology.
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he studied at Harvard and
worked as an industrial chemist (1949—taking his PhD at Columbia University (1963). He taught at —1970) before becoming a professor of linguistics at the University of and then became director of the university‟his study of the varieties of English spoken in published as The Social Stratification of English in New York Citythe late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard but respected as a with its own grammatical rules, although speakers of AAsociety at large.
“ „What is success?‟s of the questions that I asked people in the first linguistic ‟s figuring out what you want to do, and then getting you to do it. Another man said it‟s making use of everything that ever ‟ve wasted your time, you‟ve been ‟ve been doing since, I seem to have been following all three ideas the same time, so they may turn out to be the same idea after all.”
12. EH Lenneberg (1921—1975)
Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology more generally about innateness. His book Biological Foundations of Language
(1967) was a major landmark. This book collected the biological literature to support
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com the pivotal claim that language is founded on species-specific anatomical and neurophysiological capabilities for language, and that those elements are found only in humans. Lenneberg pointed out that language is an example of maturationally controlled behavior, which is preprogrammed to emerge at a particular stage, i. e. a critical period, in an individual‟s life, provided the surrounding environment is normal, such as seals walking. His book has been widely accepted because of its clear explanation for difficulties in second language learning after puberty. It explains well our experience of seeing small children speak foreign languages quite naturally.
Lennerberg was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Son of a physician, he grew up in an Ann Harbor as a professor in psychology.
His 1964 paper The Capacity of Language Acquisition sets forth the arguments The Language Instinct.
His work reveals that between the ages of two and language emerges by an teens the possibility for primary language to be good; the individual as if it had set it its ways basic skills not acquired by that time usually remain deficient for life.
Stephen D. Krashen is Professor Emeritus of Learning and Instruction at
the University of Southern California. He is an expert in the field of
linguistics, specializing in theories of language acquisition and
development. Much of his research had involved the study of non-English
and bilingual language acquisition. Recently Dr. Krashen‟s research has
focused on reading and its effects on language acquisition and academic
success. In the late 1970s, Stephen Krashen began promoting the “natural approach” to language teaching, which he laid out in a landmark text he co-wrote with Tracy Terrell. His ideas about the difference between learning and acquisition have strongly influenced the field of English as a second language (ESL) for several decades. He has published hundreds of books and articles and has been invited to deliver over 500 lectures at universities throughout the United States and the
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com rest of the world. In the past five years, Stephen Krashen has fought to save whole language and bilingual education in the United States and, more recently, has been lobbying for “recreational reading” and better stocked school libraries because of research relating both to higher achievement.
14. JH Greenberg (1915—2001)
Joseph Harold Greenberg‟s stubby of both the structure of language
and the similarities between different languages gained him recognition. In the first part of his career, Greenberg of language structure that excited the entire world.
old.
Greenberg did his PhD in anthropology at University under the Africanist forces communications. This may him too, for after the war he moved into
thousands In some ways it was like reverse-engineering the Genesis story of the ‟s project should seem so Greenberg‟s method was to compare languages multilaterally — painstaking comparisons based on phonology, the way words sound; semantics, what words mean; grammar, the way words are put together to form meaningful messages; all in the light of information extrinsic to language— archaeology, genetics, and history. His most important tool was a list of 300 words which he felt constituted a sort of core to any language. This included words like pronouns, nouns for body parts, family members, and the like. The theory is that such words are less prone to change than others. Since they change less often, they are a good way to tell whether languages are related.
In 1966 he published
Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of
中华英语学习网www.100yingyu.com 官方总站：圣才学习网www.100xuexi.com Meaningful Elements. In this article he offered 45 universals of word order and inflectional categories based on data from some 30 languages. He was among the first to deal with “implicational” universals (of the form “If A, then B”). He also edited Universals of Language (1963) and the four-volume Universals of Hunan Language (1978).
Greenberg dreamed of deep unity, and he spent an extremely long career pursuing evidence for it. Always a hard worker and prodigious publisher, his ambition seemed only to grow after retirement. He was still publishing highly technical evidence when he died, at age 85. On his deathbed he told a colleague that his biggest regret was that he had never gotten around to studying the languages of Southeast Asia.
15. H. Widdowson
Henry. Gof which are on other (though such as discourse analysis
and critical discourse analysis, spread of English, English for
Special Purposes and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Language
Teaching and Learning calls him “century for international ESOL”.
‟s College of Cambridge University, and spent University of from 1993—1998 was also concurrently Professor of Applied at the Vienna. He retired from teaching in 2001 and is now Professor Emeritus, London, and Honorary Professor, University of Vienna. He is a prolific author of of two series of works for Oxford University Press: Oxford Introductions to Language Study and, in conjunction with Chris Candlin: Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education. His books include: Teaching Language as Communication (1978); two volumes of Explorations in Applied Linguistics (1979, 1984); Aspects of Language Teaching (1990); Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry (1992); Linguistics (1996) and Defining Issues in English Language Teaching (2003).
His most recent book is entitled Test, Context, Pretex: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis (2004), published by Blackwell‟s.
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