David Roach Dowty (born 1945) is a linguist known primarily for his work in

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

and

syntactic 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 ...

theory, and especially in

Montague grammar Montague grammar is an approach to natural language semantics, named after American logician Richard Montague. The Montague grammar is based on mathematical logic, especially higher-order predicate logic and lambda calculus, and makes use of th ...

and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of

linguistics 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 ...

at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory,

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 ...

and

Thematic roles Thematic role is a linguistic notion, which may refer to: * Theta role (in syntax or at the syntax-semantics interface), the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntacticall ...

, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.

Life

David Dowty received his PhD from the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

, with a thesis supervised by Robert Wall and Emmon Bach on the temporal semantics of verbs. Dowty was editor-in-chief of the journal '' Linguistics and Philosophy'' from 1988 to 1992, and associate editor of ''

Language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

''. For several years he was chairman of the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. A one-day symposium was held at the University of Groningen in honour of his sixtieth birthday, subsequently published as ''Theory and Evidence in Semantics''.

Major Publications

* ''Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: the semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague's PTQ''. Dortrecht, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1979. * (ed. with

Lauri Karttunen Lauri Juhani Karttunen (September 29, 1941 – March 20, 2022) was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow. Career Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the U ...

and Arnold M. Zwicky) ''Natural language parsing: psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. * (with Robert E. Wall and Stanley Peters) ''Introduction to Montague Semantics''. Dortrecht, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1991. *
Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection
. ''

'' 67:3 (September 1991), pp.547-619 * (ed. with Erhard W. Hinrichs and John A. Nerbonne) ''Theory and evidence in semantics''. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

References

External links

David Dowty's home page
at the Ohio State University Department of Linguistics Linguists from the United States Living people Ohio State University faculty Semanticists 1945 births {{US-linguist-stub

Life

Major Publications

See also

References

External links