Rochelle Lieber is an American Professor of Linguistics at the
University of New Hampshire
The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university with its main campus in Durham, New Hampshire, United States. It was founded and incorporated in 1866 as a land grant coll ...
. She is a
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
known for her work in
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, ...
, the
syntax
In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...
-morphology interface, and morphology and
lexical semantics
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistics, linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings.Pustejovsky, J. (2005) Lexical Semantics: Overview' in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition, V ...
.
Career
After receiving an artium baccalaureus degree in anthropology from
Vassar (1976), Lieber studied linguistics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
, receiving her Ph.D. degree in 1980. Her dissertation, ''On the Organization of the Lexicon'', was written under the direction of
Morris Halle
Morris Halle, Pinkowitz (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018), was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern ...
. It was in this work that she proposed "feature percolation," a mechanism by which the properties of
lexical item
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena (linguistics), catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take ca ...
s are inherited by their larger constituent structures, and which she articulates more fully in Lieber 1992 (77ff). Syntacticians and morphologists have made use of the concept of feature percolation in many different ways since Lieber's first proposal.
Professor Lieber has taught at the University of New Hampshire since 1981. She received the University of New Hampshire Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1991.
Lieber is the author of ''Deconstructing Morphology: Word Formation in Syntactic Theory'' (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), an influential attempt to reduce morphology to the syntactic principles of
government and binding theory Government and binding (GB, GBT) is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of his earlier theories and was ...
. In ''Deconstructing Morphology'', Lieber makes two statements that are often quoted: "no one has yet succeeded in deriving the properties of words and the properties of sentences from the same principles of grammar," and "the conceptually simplest possible theory would then be the one in which all morphology is done as a part of syntax" (Lieber 1992: 21).
Lieber's monograph, ''Morphology and Lexical Semantics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), is the first attempt to develop a theory of the lexical semantics of derivation and compounding.
In addition to several monographs, she is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on morphology.
Honors
She served as the co-editor of the
Wiley-Blackwell
Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...
Language and Linguistics Compass.
In 2015 she and co-authors
Laurie Bauer and
Ingo Plag
Ingo Plag (born 2 August 1962) is a German linguist and Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf. In 2015 he and co-authors Laurie Bauer and Rochelle Lieber ...
were the recipients of the
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for their 2013 work, ''
The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology.''
Books
* Lieber, R. 1987. ''An integrated theory of autosegmental processes''. Albany: State University of New York Press.
* Lieber, R. 1990. ''On the organization of the lexicon''. Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. New York: Garland.
* Lieber, R. 1992. ''Deconstructing morphology: Word formation in syntactic theory''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Lieber, R. 2004. ''Morphology and lexical semantics''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Štekauer, P. & R. Lieber, eds. 2005. ''Handbook of word-formation''. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
* Lieber, R. & P. Štekauer, eds. 2009. ''Handbook of Compounding''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Bauer, L., Lieber, R., Plag, I. 2013. ''
The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Lieber, R. 2016. ''English nouns: The ecology of nominalization.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardback ; paperback .
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lieber, Rochelle
Living people
Linguists from the United States
Generative linguistics
Morphologists
University of New Hampshire faculty
Vassar College alumni
American women linguists
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)