James David McCawley (March 30, 1938 – April 10, 1999) was a Scottish-American linguist.

Biography

McCawley was born James Quillan McCawley, Jr. to Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley (b. 1901), a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley (b. 1899), a businessman. In 1939 his father and two brothers moved to Toronto and founded a roofing company, but his mother remained in Glasgow with the children until after World War II. James Sr. moved to New York City and finally Chicago, where the family joined him. It was on his arrival in America that young McCawley changed his name to James David McCawley, dropping the "Junior." He skipped several grades in school, entered the University of Chicago in 1954 at the age of 16, and soon gained early admission to the graduate school, from which he received an M.S. in mathematics in 1958. He then received a Fulbright fellowship to study mathematics and logic in 1959–60 at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. During this time he became disillusioned with mathematics, and after sitting in on a linguistics course taught by

Eric Hamp Eric Pratt Hamp (November 16, 1920 – February 17, 2019) was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who ...

, he became more and more interested in the subject and began taking language courses; on his return to America, he applied to the new linguistics graduate program at MIT and was accepted, spending the next three years as a member of the first Ph.D. class there. He worked as a research assistant with the Mechanical Translation group in 1962 and 1963, and in 1965 he received his doctorate for a dissertation under Noam Chomsky on ''The accentual system of modern standard Japanese''. By this time he had already returned to the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor of Linguistics. McCawley worked at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago from 1964 until his sudden and unexpected death. At the time of his passing, he was working on two books, a collection of his recent articles and a text on the relation of philosophy of science to linguistics. Advisees include Donka Farkas, William O'Grady,

Georgia M. Green Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory edito ...

, and Salikoko Mufwene. His interests encompassed

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 ( constituency) ...

, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology. He is perhaps best known within linguistics for his work in

generative semantics Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generati ...

. Outside academia he is noted for ''The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters'', his guidebook to deciphering Chinese restaurant menus. He had an interest in libertarian politics and once ran (unsuccessfully) for election to state office on the Libertarian ticket. Under the pseudonym "Quang Phúc Đông" (supposedly a linguist at the fictitious South Hanoi Institute of Technology), McCawley wrote a paper on "English sentences without overt grammatical subject."

References

Books

*''The Phonological Component of a Grammar of Japanese.'' The Hague: Mouton, 1968. (Revised version of PhD thesis, ''The accentual system of standard Japanese''.) *''Grammar and Meaning: Papers on Syntactic and Semantic Topics.'' Tokyo: Taishukan, 1973. Reprint. New York: Academic Press, 1976. *''Notes from the Linguistic Underground.'' (''Syntax and Semantics'', vol. 7.) New York: Academic Press, 1976. *''Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder.'' University of Chicago Press, 1979. *''Everything that Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know About Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask)''. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Blackwell, 1982. (hardback), (paperback) / 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1993. *''Thirty Million Theories of Grammar.'' University of Chicago Press, 1982. *''The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters.'' University of Chicago Press, 1984. Reprint. University of Chicago Press, 2004. *''

The Syntactic Phenomena of English ''The Syntactic Phenomena of English'' is a book that describes syntax in the English language by James D. McCawley James David McCawley (March 30, 1938 – April 10, 1999) was a Scottish-American linguist. Biography McCawley was born Jame ...

.'' University of Chicago Press, 1988. 2 vols. Vol. 1 , Vol. 2 *''A Linguistic Flea Circus.'' Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1991. / 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1998. (hardback) (paperback)

External links

* at the University of Chicago (last revised in 2006 and as stored at archive.org)
Memorial page
at the University of Chicago *
English sentences without overt grammatical subject
(PDF)

Satirical linguistics

Papers by and about McCawley, which originally appeared in ''Lingua Pranca'' in 1978:

James D. McCawley

James D. McCawley

Elan Dresher and Norbert Hornstein {{DEFAULTSORT:McCawley, James D. 1938 births 1999 deaths Scottish emigrants to the United States Linguists from the United States Syntacticians University of Chicago faculty Linguistic Society of America presidents 20th-century linguists Linguists of Japanese

Biography

References

Books

Further reading

External links

Satirical linguistics