Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936, in Weehawken,

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

) is an American linguist.

Biography

Postal received his PhD from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

in 1963 and taught at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

until 1965. That year, he moved to the

City University of New York The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...

. In 1967 he was appointed to a research position at

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and he remained on their research staff until 1994. An important figure in the early development of

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

, he became a proponent of the

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

movement along with

George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff ( ; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The ...

, James D. McCawley, 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 Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

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. * 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, US, 2004).

References

External links

NYU)

criticism of Chomsky by Postal 1936 births Living people Linguists from the United States Syntacticians New York University faculty {{US-linguist-stub