David Roach Dowty (born 1945
) is a linguist known primarily for his work in
semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
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 __notoc__
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 ...
and
Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of
linguistics at the
Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory,
Lexical semantics and
Thematic roles,
Categorial grammar, and Semantics of
Tense and
Aspect.
Life
David Dowty received his PhD from the
University of Texas at Austin, 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''. 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 and Arnold M. Zwicky
Arnold M. Zwicky (born September 6, 1940) is a perennial visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University.
Early life and education
Zwicky was b ...
) ''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
. '' Language'' 67:3 (September 1991), pp.547-619
* (ed. with Erhard W. Hinrichs and John A. Nerbonne
John A. Nerbonne (born October 5, 1951) is an American Computational linguistics, computational linguist. He was a professor of humanities computing at the University of Groningen until January 2017, when he gave his valedictory address at the ce ...
) ''Theory and evidence in semantics''. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
See also
* Syntax‐semantics interface
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