George Nickerson Clements (October 5, 1940 – August 30, 2009) was an American
theoretical linguist
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the ...
specializing in
phonology.
Career
Clements was born in
Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated in
New Haven,
Paris and
London. He received his Ph.D. from the
School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, in 1973, defending a thesis on the
Ewe language based on a year of field work in
Ghana. He was a visiting scientist at
M.I.T. (1973–75) and held appointments as professor at
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
(1975–82) and
Cornell (1982–91) before moving to the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) in Paris in 1992.
Clements' main research was in
phonology with a special focus on
African languages. He is best known for his research in
syllable theory,
tone and
feature theory which have contributed to the modern theory of sound patterning in spoken language. At the time of his death, his work was concerned with the principles underlying speech sound inventories across languages (Clements & Ridouane 2011).
Personal
He was married to French linguist,
Annie Rialland
Annie Rialland (born March 17, 1948 in Jans, near Nantes, France) is a French linguist who is Director of Research emerita of the CNRS Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (Paris). Her main domains of expertise are phonetics, phonology, pro ...
. He died of
cancer in
Chatham, Massachusetts
Chatham () is a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. Chatham is located at the southeast tip of Cape Cod and has historically been a fishing community. First settled by the English in 1664, the township was originally called Mo ...
, at the age of 68.
[Elizabeth Hume, 2009-08-31]
Obituary on LINGUIST list
Retrieved 2009-10-01.
Books
* Clements, G. N. & S. J. Keyser, 1983. ''CV Phonology: a Generative Theory of the Syllable'' (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 9), MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma.
* Halle, Morris & G. N. Clements, 1983. ''Problem Book in Phonology''. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press and Bradford Books.
* Clements, G. N. & J. Goldsmith, eds., 1984. ''Autosegmental Studies in Bantu Tone''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
* Clements, G. N. & R. Ridouane, eds., 2011. ''Where do phonological features come from? Cognitive, physical and developmental bases of distinctive speech categories''. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam.
Other selected publications
* Clements, G. N., 1985. "The Geometry of Phonological Features," ''Phonology Yearbook'' 2, 225-252
* Clements, G. N., 1990. "The Role of the Sonority Cycle in Core Syllabification." In John Kingston & M. Beckman, eds., ''Papers in Laboratory Phonology I'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 283–333
* Clements, G. N. & Elizabeth Hume, 1995. "The Internal Organization of Speech Sounds" In John Goldsmith, ed., ''Handbook of Phonological Theory''. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 245–306
* Clements, G. N., 2003. "Feature Economy in Sound Systems", ''Phonology'' 20.3, pp. 287–333
* Clements, G. N. & Annie Rialland, 2008. "Africa as a phonological area". In Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse, eds, ''A Linguistic Geography of Africa''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36–85.
References
External links
Nick Clements's personal webpage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clements, Nick
1940 births
2009 deaths
Linguists from the United States
Harvard University faculty
Cornell University faculty
Phonologists
20th-century linguists