Peter Hugoe Matthews, FBA (10 March 1934 – 7 April 2023) was a British linguist and historian of linguistics. He was a fellow of

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

, and formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

(1980–2001). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. Matthews is perhaps best known for his writings on

linguistic morphology In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, wh ...

. He published two monographs on the subject. Matthews was an early follower 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 ...

, but lost enthusiasm for the "generative enterprise" during the 1960s. He described the Chomskyan revolution as "the Best Thing that has happened to linguistics in the past 2500 years" (with his tongue squarely in his cheek, of course). But he also wrote that dominance of various Chomskyan ideas is not "a Good Thing, and I would not be disappointed if my study of their origins were to lead more scholars to question them". Peter Hugoe Matthews died on 7 April 2023, at the age of 89.

Selected publications

* ''Inflectional Morphology: A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation'' (1972) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, * '' Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word-structure'' (1974, 2nd revd edition 1991) * ''Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence'' (1979) * ''

Syntax 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 (constituenc ...

'' (1981) * ''Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky'' (1993) * '' A Short History of Structural Linguistics'' (2001) * '' Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction'' (2003) Oxford University Press, Oxford * '' The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics'' (2005, 3rd revd edition 2014) Oxford University Press, Oxford * '' Syntactic Relations: A Critical Survey'' (2007) * ''The Positions of Adjectives in English'' (2014) Oxford University Press, Oxford * ''What Graeco-Roman Grammar was About'' (2019) Oxford University Press, Oxford

References

1934 births 2023 deaths 20th-century British linguists Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Fellows of the British Academy Morphologists Syntacticians Presidents of the Philological Society {{UK-linguist-stub