John Anton Goldsmith (born 1951) is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, with appointments in

linguistics Linguistics is the science, 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 ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

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 yea ...

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 Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonolo ...

. 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 Universi ...

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, 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, a ...

Research

Goldsmith's research ranges from

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

to computational linguistics. His PhD thesis introduced

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

; 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 Unsupervised learning is a type of algorithm that learns patterns from untagged data. The hope is that through mimicry, which is an important mode of learning in people, the machine is forced to build a concise representation of its world and t ...

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.

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