Arnold Zwicky
Born
Allentown, Pennsylvania
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma mater
  • Princetown University,
  • MIT
SpouseAnn Daingerfield Zwicky
Scientific career
FieldsLinguistics
Institutions
  • Stanford University,
  • Ohio State University
ThesisTopics in Sanskrit Phonology (1965)
Doctoral advisorMorris Halle
Websitehttps://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/

Arnold M. Zwicky (born September 6, 1940) is a perennial visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University.[1]

Early life and education

Zwicky was born on September 6, 1940, in Allentown, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family.

He received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Princeton University (1962). He was a student of Morris Halle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in 1965.

Zwicky identifies himself as an atheist American Jew and from an early age as a non-dominant gay man, which led him to feel throughout life as an outcast even in the LGBTQ community, and influenced him to write extensively about these identities from the linguistic perspective, in his blog.[2][3]

Career

Zwicky has made notable contributions to fields of phonology (half-rhymes), morphology (realizational morphology, rules of referral), syntax (clitics, construction grammar), interfaces (the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax), sociolinguistics and American dialectology.

He coined the term "recency illusion", the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction or phrase is of recent origin when it is in fact of long-established usage.[4] For example, the figurative use of the intensifier "literally" is often perceived to have recent origin, but in fact it dates back several centuries.[5] The phenomenon is thought to be caused by selective attention.

At the Linguistic Society of America's 1999 Summer Institute (held at UIUC) he was the Edward Sapir professor, the most prestigious chair of this organization, of which he is a past president.[6]

He is one of the editors of Handbook of Morphology, among other published works. He is also well known as a frequent contributor to the linguistics blog Language Log, as well as his own personal blog that largely focuses on linguistics issues.[7]

Zwicky is a former board member of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, who chose him as 2008 GLBT Scientist of the Year.[8]

Since the early 2000s, he has withdrawn from social life and has shifted from traditional academic writing to writing almost exclusively on his blog.[2]

Selected publications

  • Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to auxiliary reduction. With Geoffrey K. Pullum. http://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/PZ1997.pdf
  • 1970: Auxiliary reduction in English. Linguistic inquiry 1(3), 323–336.
  • 1971: In a Manner of Speaking. Linguistic Inquiry 2 (2), 223–233.
  • 1971: On Invited Inferences. With Michael L. Geis. Linguistic Inquiry 2 (4), 561–566.
  • 1972: Note on a Phonological Hierarchy in English. In Robert S. Stockwell & Ronald K. S. Macaulay (Eds.), Linguistic change and generative theory, 275–301.
  • 1974: Hey, whatsyourname. Chicago linguistic society 10.
  • 1975: Ambiguity tests and how to fail them. With Jerrold M Sadock. Syntax and Semantics 4, 1–36.
  • 1977: On Clitics. Indiana University Linguistics Club.
  • 1983: Cliticization vs. Inflection: English n't. With Geoffrey K. Pullum Language 59 (3), 502–513.
  • 1985: Clitics and Particles. Language 61 (2), 283–305.
  • 1985: Heads. Journal of linguistics 21 (1), 1–29.
  • 1985: How to describe inflection. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 11, 372–386.
  • 1985: Speech Act Distinctions in Syntax. With Jerrold M Sadock. Language typology and syntactic description 1, 155–196.
  • 1986: Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict. With Geoffrey K Pullum. Language, 751–773.
  • 1987: Plain morphology and expressive morphology. With Geoffrey K Pullum. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 330–340
  • 1987: Suppressing the Zs. Journal of Linguistics Vol. 23 (1), 133–148.
  • 1988: The syntax-phonology interface. With Geoffrey K Pullum. In Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. 1, 255–280.
  • 1996: Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena. Edited with Aaron L. Halpern. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • 2001: The Handbook of Morphology. Edited with Andrew Spencer. Hoboken: Wiley.
  • 2005: Just between Dr. Language and I. Language Log. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html

See also

References

  1. ↑ "2005-2006 Fellows". Stanford Humanities Center. Stanford University. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 2008-07-20.
  2. 1 2 "An Interview with Arnold Zwicky | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2023-12-21.
  3. ↑ An example of Zwicky identifying himself as a Jew on his blog. He has written extensively on Yiddish and Yinglish and their influence and acceptance into the spoken American language.
  4. ↑ Intensive and Quotative ALL: something old, something new, John R. Rickford, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky, Isabelle Buchstaller, American Speech 2007 82(1):3-31; Duke University Press (what Arnold Zwicky (2005) has dubbed the "recency illusion," whereby people think that linguistic features they’ve only recently noticed are in fact new).
  5. ↑ "Language Log: Literally: a history". itre.cis.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-26.
  6. ↑ Past Linguistic Institutes: Named Professorships Archived 2012-08-22 at the Wayback Machine, Linguistic Society of America, official website
  7. ↑ "Arnold Zwicky's Blog | A blog mostly about language". Arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com. 2013-10-27. Retrieved 2013-10-31.
  8. ↑ "NOGLSTP Bulletin, Winter 2008" (PDF). Retrieved 2013-12-04.
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