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.

Biography

Goldsmith obtained his

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

at Swarthmore College in 1972, and completed his PhD in Linguistics at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in 1976, under the linguist Morris Halle. He was on the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at many universities, such as McGill,

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...

, and UCSD. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected as a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

Research

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to

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 ...

. His PhD thesis introduced

autosegmental phonology Autosegmental phonology is a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a theory of phonological representation, autosegmental phonology develop ...

; the idea that phonological phenomena is a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments, each representing certain features of speech. His more recent research focuses on unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (as demonstrated by the Linguistica project, a body of software that tries to automatically analyze the

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

of a language), as well as extending computational linguistics algorithms to

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combine ...

Books

* John A Goldsmith, Bernard Laks, ''Battle in the Mind Fields'', University of Chicago Press, 2018

External links

Goldsmith's homepage

Autosegmental phonology
(Goldsmith's doctoral dissertation)
Goldsmith's 2014 lecture at the University of Chicago

References

Linguists from the United States Phonologists Living people Swarthmore College alumni MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni University of Chicago faculty 1951 births Distinguished professors in the United States Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America {{US-linguist-stub