John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
James D. McCawley
James David McCawley (March 30, 1938 – April 10, 1999) was a Scottish-American linguist.
Biography
McCawley was born James Quillan McCawley, Jr. to Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley (b. 1901), a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley (b. ...
, and
Paul Postal
Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist.
Biography
Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. I ...
. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966–1985 and has worked in
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
,
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...
and
British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...
, and until spring 2021, he taught at the
University of North Texas
The University of North Texas (UNT) is a public research university in Denton, Texas. It was founded as a nonsectarian, coeducational, private teachers college in 1890 and was formally adopted by the state 11 years later."Denton Normal School, ...
.
Ross's 1967 MIT dissertation is a landmark in syntactic theory and documents in great detail Ross's discovery of syntactic islands.
Ross is also well known for his onomastic fecundity; he has coined many new terms describing syntactic phenomena that are well known to this day, including copula switch, Do-Gobbling, freeze(s),
gapping In linguistics, gapping is a type of ellipsis that occurs in the non-initial conjuncts of coordinate structures. Gapping usually elides minimally a finite verb and further any non-finite verbs that are present. This material is "gapped" from the no ...
pruning
Pruning is a horticultural, arboricultural, and silvicultural practice involving the selective removal of certain parts of a plant, such as branches, buds, or roots.
The practice entails the ''targeted'' removal of diseased, damaged, dead, ...
,
scrambling
Scrambling is a mountaineering term for ascending steep terrain using one's hands to assist in holds and balance.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. It is also used to describe terrain that falls between hiking and rock climbing (as a “scrambl ...
sluicing
In syntax, sluicing is a type of Ellipsis (linguistics), ellipsis that occurs in both direct and indirect interrogative clauses. The ellipsis is introduced by a ''wh''-expression, whereby in most cases, everything except the ''wh''-expression is e ...
,
slifting In linguistics, slifting is a grammatical construction in which the embedded clause of a propositional attitude, speech report, or emotive is preposed. For instance the English sentence ''Nick is a great singer, Sara claims'' is the slifted variant ...
As a student, Ross was exposed to many influential figures within the field. Ross was a student of Bernard Bloch, Samuel Martin and Rulon Wells at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
;
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...
Franklin Southworth
Franklin C. Southworth (born 1929) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus of South Asian linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private r ...
at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
; and
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
,
Morris Halle
Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonolo ...
,
Paul Postal
Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist.
Biography
Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. I ...
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. Ross met Lakoff in 1963 and began collaborating with him especially on work by and influenced by Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966–1985 and has worked in
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
,
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...
and
British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...
.
Until Spring 2021, he taught at the
University of North Texas
The University of North Texas (UNT) is a public research university in Denton, Texas. It was founded as a nonsectarian, coeducational, private teachers college in 1890 and was formally adopted by the state 11 years later."Denton Normal School, ...
and his class offerings there included Linguistics and Literature, Syntax, Field Methods, History of English, Semantics and Pragmatics; he also oversaw U.N.T.'s Doctorate in Poetics program.
Relating to syntactic islands, he also coined the terms "left-branch condition", "complex-np constraint", "coordinate structure constraint", and "sentential subject constraint". In
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, he suggested the term
conspiracy
A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between persons (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agre ...
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,poetics).
Works
* Ross, John R. (1966). A proposed rule of tree-pruning. In ''Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation'' (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
* Ross, John R. (1966). Relativization in extraposed clauses. In ''Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation'' (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
* Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). (Published as Ross 1986). (Available online at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15166).
* Ross, John R. (1967). On the cyclic nature of English pronominalization. In ''To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday'' (No. 3, pp. 1669–1682). The Hague: Mouton.
* Ross, John R. (1969). Auxiliaries as main verbs. In W. Todd (Ed.), ''Studies in philosophical linguistics'' (Series 1). Evanston, IL: Great Expectations Press.
* Ross, John R. (1970). On declarative sentences. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), ''Readings in English transformational grammar'' (pp. 222–272). Washington: Georgetown University Press.
* Ross, John R. (1970). Gapping and the order of constituents. In M. Bierwisch & Karl E. Heidolph (Eds.), ''Progress in linguistics''. The Hague: Mouton.
* Ross, John R. (1972) Act. In Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (Eds.), ''Semantics of Natural Languages,'' D. Reidel and Company, Dordrecht, Holland, pp. 70–126.
* Ross, John R. (1972). The category squish: Endstation Hauptwort. In Paul M. Peranteau, Judith N. Levi, Gloria C. Phares (Eds.), ''Proceedings of the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society,'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 316–328.
* Ross, John R. (1972). Doubl-ing. In J. Kimball (Ed.), ''Syntax and semantics'' (Vol. 1, pp. 157–186). New York: Seminar Press.
* Ross, John R. (1972). A reanalysis of English word stress (part I). In Michael K. Brame (Ed.), ''Contributions to generative phonology''. Austin: University of Texas Press.
* Ross, John R. (1973). Slifting. In Maurice Gross and Marcel Schützenberger (Eds.), ''The Formal Analysis of Natural Languages,'' Mouton and Company, ’s Gravenhage, Holland, pp. 133–172.
* Ross, John R. (1973). The Penthouse Principle and the order of constituents. In Claudia Corum et al. (Eds.), ''You Take the High Node and I’ll Take the Low Node,'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 397–422.
* Ross, Haj (1982). The sound of meaning. (1982). In ''Linguistics in the Morning Calm,'' edited by the Linguistic Society of Korea, Hanshin Publishing Company, Seoul, Korea, pp. 275–290.
* Ross, Haj (1984). Inner islands. In Claudia Brugman and Monica Macauley et al. (Eds.) ''Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society,'' Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 258 – 265.
* Ross, John R. (1986). ''Infinite syntax!''. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, .
* Ross, Haj (1995) Defective noun phrases. In Audra Dainora, Rachel Hemphill, Barbara Lukas, Barbara Need and Sheri Pargman (Eds.) (eds.), ''Proceedings of the Thirty-First Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society,'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 398–440.
* Ross, Haj (2000) The frozenness of pseudoclefts – towards an inequality-based syntax. In Arika Okrent and John P. Boyle (Eds.), ''Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society,'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 385–426.
* Ross, John R. (2004). Siamese sentences – a first look at a parallel construction. In Mary Andronis, Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha, and Keiko Yoshimura (Eds), ''Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. pp. 569–584.
Collaborations
* Cooper, William E. and Ross, John R. (1975). Word order. In Robin E. Grossman et al. (eds.), ''Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism,'' Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 63–111.
* Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. (1966). Criterion for verb phrase constituency. In ''Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation'' (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
* Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. (1976). Is deep structure necessary?. In J. D. McCawley (ed.), ''Syntax and Semantics 7'' (pp. 159–164).