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The following is a list of some notable phonologists (scholars in the field of
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 ...
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay (13 March 1845 – 3 November 1929) was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
For most of his life Baudouin de Courtenay worked at Imper ...
Mary Beckman
Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.
Career
Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics a ...
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Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalis ...
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
Laura J. Downing
Laura J. Downing (born 15 June 1954, Mitchel AFB, New York) is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.
Education and career
Downing earned her B.S. in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1977, and her PhD ...
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John Rupert Firth
John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s.
Education and career
F ...
Mark Hale
Mark Hale is an Americans, American linguistics professor now teaching at Concordia University (Montreal), Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He studies the methodology of historical linguistics as well as theoretical linguistics, I ...
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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 ...
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,Daniel Jones
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René Kager
René Willibrord Joseph Kager (; born 17 July, 1957) is a Dutch linguist and Chair of English Linguistics and Phonology at Utrecht University. He is known for his works on phonology.
Career
Kager is a theoretical phonologist and works on child ...
Jonathan Kaye
Jonathan Andrew Kaye (born August 2, 1970) is an American professional golfer who played on the PGA Tour.
Biography
Kaye was born in Denver, Colorado, and is Jewish. He attended Sunnyslope High School in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was a star in ...
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Michael Kenstowicz
Michael John Kenstowicz (born August 18, 1945) is an American linguist and professor of linguistics at MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
He is best known for his works on phonetics and phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguis ...
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Paul Kiparsky
René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941) is a Finnish professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky.
Kiparsky is especially known for his contributions to ...
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Mikołaj Kruszewski
Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski, (Russian language, Russianized, ''Nikolay Vyacheslavovich Krushevsky'', Никола́й Вячесла́вович Круше́вский) (December 18, 1851, Lutsk – November 12, 1887, Kazan) was a Polish linguist ...
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Jerzy Kuryłowicz
Jerzy Kuryłowicz (; 26 August 1895 – 28 January 1978) was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages.
Life
Born in Stanislawow, Austria-Hungary. He was a Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply i ...
David Odden
David Arnold Odden (; born 1954) is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Ban ...
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Marc van Oostendorp
Marc van Oostendorp (; born 15 December 1967, Rotterdam) is a Dutch linguist and Esperantist. From 2004 he has served as a weekly commentator on linguistics for Radio Noord-Holland. Since 2007, he has researched phonological microvariation, dial ...
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Janet Pierrehumbert
Janet Pierrehumbert (b. 1954) is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar ...
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Kenneth Pike
Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 – December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language ...
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Alan Prince
Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has be ...
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Charles Reiss
Charles Reiss ( ) is an American linguistics professor teaching at Concordia University in Montreal.
His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology, historical linguistics, and cognitive science. Along with colleague Mark H ...
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Keren Rice
Keren Rice (born 1949) is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Education and career
Rice earned her PhD in 1976 from the Univ ...
Wendy Sandler
Wendy Sandler is an American-Israeli linguist who is known for her research on the phonology of Sign Languages.
Sandler earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987, with a dissertation entitled "Sequentiality an ...
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Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sap ...
Elisabeth Selkirk
Elisabeth O. Selkirk (born 1945) is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
S ...
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Sibawayh
Sibawayh ( ar, سِيبَوَيْهِ ' or ; fa, سِیبُویه ' ; c. 760–796), whose full name is Abu Bishr Amr ibn Uthman ibn Qanbar al-Basri (, '), was a Persian leading grammarian of Basra and author of the earliest book on Arabic ...
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Paul Smolensky
Paul Smolensky (born May 5, 1955) is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond Washington.
Along with Alan Prince, in 1993 he developed O ...
Henry Sweet
Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', as hosted oencyclopedia.com/ref>
As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic lang ...
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Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy ( rus, Никола́й Серге́евич Трубецко́й, p=trʊbʲɪtsˈkoj; 16 April 1890 – 25 June 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague Schoo ...
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Richard Wiese
Richard Wiese (born July 13, 1959) is an American explorer, the longest serving President of The Explorers Club, and Executive Producer and Host of the multiple Emmy Award-winning ABC and PBS program, Born to Explore.
Early life and education
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Moira Yip
Moira Yip (b. 1949) is a British-American linguist. She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1980 at MIT as a student of Morris Halle. She retired from her position as Professor of Linguistics at University College London (UCL) in 2009. While at UCL ...