Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in
Weehawken
Weehawken is a township in the northern part of Hudson County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is located largely on the Hudson Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 17,197. ,
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
) is an American linguist.
Biography
Postal received his PhD from
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
in 1963 and taught 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 ...
until 1965. That year, he moved to the
City University of New York. In 1967 he was appointed to a research position at
IBM and he remained on their research staff until 1994.
An important figure in the early development of
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
, he became a proponent of the
generative semantics movement along with
George Lakoff,
James D. McCawley
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. ...
, and Haj Ross. In the 1970s, with David M. Perlmutter, he developed Relational Grammar. Later, with David E. Johnson, he developed Arc Pair Grammar. These non-transformational theories of grammar have had an indirect but major impact on modern syntactic analysis.
Since his involvement with generative semantics, he has been a vocal critic of Noam Chomsky and work done in Chomsky's frameworks.
[Harris, Randy Allen (1993). ''The Linguistics Wars.'' Oxford: OUP. ]
Selected bibliography
*Postal, Paul M. (1968). ''Aspects of phonological theory''. New York: Harper & Row.
*Postal, Paul M. (1972). "The best theory". In S. Peters (Ed.), ''Goals of linguistic theory''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
*Postal, Paul M. (1974) ''On Raising: One Rule of English Grammar and Its Theoretical Implications''. Cambridge: MIT Press.
*Johnson, David E.; & Postal, Paul M. (1980). ''Arc pair grammar.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press.
*Peter Culicover, Culicover, P. W., & Postal, Paul M. (2000). ''Parasitic gaps''. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
*Postal, Paul M. (2003).
Policing the Content of Linguistic Examples. Language. 79 (1), 182-188.
*Postal, Paul M. ''Skeptical linguistic essays'' (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
References
External links
NYU)
criticism of Chomsky by Postal
1936 births
Living people
Linguists from the United States
Syntacticians
New York University faculty
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