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Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American
linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...
and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research lab at Stanford University that offers a residential postdoctoral fellowship program for scientists and scholars studying "the five core social and ...
at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. A three–day conference was held at UC Berkeley in celebration of his 80th birthday in 2009. Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the
Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...
. He died in 2014.


Early years

Fillmore spent three years in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, where he intercepted coded Russian conversations on short-wave radio and taught himself Japanese. Following his discharge, he taught English at a Buddhist girls' school while also taking classes at Kyoto University. He returned to the US, receiving his doctorate at the University of Michigan and then teaching at The Ohio State University in Columbus. At the time, he was still a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest
transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combi ...
phase. In 1963, his seminal article ''The position of embedding transformations in a Grammar'' introduced the transformational cycle. The central idea is to first apply rules to the smallest applicable unit, then to the smallest unit containing that one, and so on. This principle has been a foundational insight for theories of syntax since that time.


Cognitive linguistics

By 1965, Fillmore had come to acknowledge that semantics plays a crucial role in grammar. In 1968, he published his theory of
Case Grammar Case grammar is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires. The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fil ...
(Fillmore 1968), which highlighted the fact that syntactic structure can be predicted by semantic participants. An action can have an agent, a patient, purposes, locations, and so on. These participants were called "cases" in his original paper, but later came to be known as
semantic roles In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For exam ...
or
thematic relation In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For ex ...
s, which are similar to
theta role In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb ''put'' requires three a ...
s in generative grammar. Following his move to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, this theory eventually evolved into a broader cognitive linguistic theory called Frame Semantics (1976). A commercial event, for instance, crucially involved elements such as a seller, a buyer, some good, and some money. In language, such an event can be expressed in a variety of different ways, e.g. using the verb 'to sell' or the verb 'to buy'. According to frame semantics, meaning is best studied in terms of the mental concepts and participants in the minds of the speaker and addressee. Around the same time, Fillmore's Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, delivered in 1971 and published in 1975, contributed to establishing the field of linguistic pragmatics, which studies the relationship between linguistic form and the context of utterance. In all of this research, he illuminated the fundamental importance of semantics, and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena. His collaboration with Paul Kay and
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The conc ...
was generalized into the theory of
Construction Grammar Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
. This work aimed at developing a complete theory of grammar that would fully acknowledge the role of semantics right from the start, while simultaneously adopting constraint-based formalisms as popular in computer science and
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
. This theory built on the notion of construction from traditional and pedagogical grammars rather than the rule-based formalisms that dominate most of generative grammar. One of Fillmore's most widely noticed works of the time (with Paul Kay and Cathy O'Connor) appeared in 'Language' in 1988 as "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone". Their paper highlighted the merits of such a theory of by focusing on the 'let alone' construction. Over time, construction grammar developed into a research area of its own, and a number of variants have been proposed over the years by different researchers. Fillmore is now widely recognized as one of the founders of
cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are co ...
. The first chapter of “Cognitive Linguistics” by Cruse and Croft (2004), for instance, begins with a summary of Fillmore's work. Fillmore served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1991 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000. His legacy continues with his many notable students, including Adele Goldberg, Laura Michaelis, Christopher Johnson, Miriam R. L. Petruck,
Len Talmy Leonard Talmy is an emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University at Buffalo in New York. He is known for his pioneering work in cognitive linguistics, more specifically, in the relationship between semantic and formal linguisti ...
, and
Eve Sweetser Eve Eliot Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time. She has served as Director of ...
.


FrameNet

In 1988, Fillmore taught classes in computational lexicography at a summer school at the University of Pisa, where he met Sue Atkins, who was conducting frame-semantic analyses from a lexicographic perspective. In their subsequent discussions and collaborations, Fillmore came to acknowledge the importance of considering corpus data. They discussed the "dictionary of the future", in which every word would be linked to example sentences from corpora. After 23 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Fillmore retired in 1994 and joined Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. There, he started a project called FrameNet, an on-line structured description of the English lexicon implementing much of what he had earlier proposed more theoretically in his theory of Frame semantics, while implementing the idea of emphasizing example sentences from corpora. In FrameNet, words are described in terms of the frames they evoke. Data is gathered from the
British National Corpus The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English language, English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, w ...
, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by both lexical units and Frames. FrameNet has inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese. Due to the project's influence, issue 16 of the '' International Journal of Lexicography'' was devoted entirely to FrameNet. The project has been highly influential in
computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics d ...
and
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
as well. FrameNet led to the establishment of the task of shallow semantic parsing or automatic semantic role labelling (SRL). The first automatic SRL system was developed by Berkeley graduate student Daniel Gildea. Semantic Role Labelling has since become one of the standard NLP tasks. In recognition of his contributions to computational linguistics, Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the
Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...
. Together with Collin F. Baker, he also received the 2012 Antonio Zampolli Prize, awarded by the European Language Resources Association.


Publications

His seminal publications include: *"The Position of Embedding Transformations in a Grammar" (1963). In ''Word'' 19:208-231. *"The Case for Case" (1968). In Bach and Harms (Ed.): ''Universals in Linguistic Theory''. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1-88. *"Frame semantics and the nature of language" (1976): . In ''Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech''. Volume 280: 20-32. *"Frame semantics" (1982). In ''Linguistics in the Morning Calm''. Seoul, Hanshin Publishing Co., 111-137. * (with Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O'Connor) "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone" (1988). Language. Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), 501-538 * (with Sue Atkins) "Starting where the dictionaries stop: The challenge for computational lexicography". (1994). In Atkins, B. T. S. and A. Zampolli (Eds.) ''Computational Approaches to the Lexicon''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 349-393. * (with Paul Kay)
Construction Grammar
(1995). Stanford: CSLI *''Lectures on Deixis'' (1997). Stanford: CSLI Publications. (originally distributed as Fillmore (1975/1971) ''Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis'' by the Indiana University Linguistics Club)


Personal life

Fillmore was married to Lily Wong Fillmore, a linguist and professor emeritus at Berkeley.


References


External links


Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fillmore, Charles 1929 births 2014 deaths University of Michigan alumni Ohio State University faculty University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Linguists from the United States American cognitive scientists Syntacticians Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows Linguistic Society of America presidents Computational linguistics researchers Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America