Peter Cole (1941–2023) was an American linguist who made notable contributions to comparative grammar, in particular to the study of Hebrew, Quechua, Chinese and Malay syntax.

Education and career

Cole attended Bard College and first worked as an English teacher in Mexico, Venezuela and Israel. He went on to study linguistics at Southern Illinois University, and received his PhD degree from the University of Illinois in 1973 (supervised by Jerry Morgan) . After teaching there for 15 years, he moved to the University of Delaware, where he worked until his retirement in 2019.

Scientific contributions

Peter Cole's main contributions have been to the study of comparative syntax, especially with respect to relative clauses (e.g. Cole et al. 1977; Cole 1987),

switch-reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject of the verb in one clause is corefe ...

(e.g. Cole 1983), and reflexive constructions (e.g. Cole et al. 1990; Cole et al. 2006; Cole et al. 2015). He did fieldwork on several varieties of Quechua (e.g. Cole 1982) and on several varieties of

Malay Malay may refer to: Languages * Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore ** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century ** Indonesi ...

(e.g. Cole & Son 2004; McKinnon et al. 2011). For many years, Cole was an associate editor of the journal ''

Linguistic Inquiry ''Linguistic Inquiry'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal in generative linguistics published by the MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Un ...

''.

Personal life

Cole was married to linguist Gabriella Hermon, with whom he coauthored numerous works.

Selected works

Books

*Cole, Peter & Sadock, Jerrold M. (eds.). 1977. ''Grammatical relations'' (Syntax and Semantics 8). New York: Academic Press. *Cole, Peter. 1982. ''Imbabura Quechua'' (Lingua Descriptive Studies 5). Amsterdam: North-Holland. *Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella & Huang, C.-T. James (eds.). 2001. ''Long-distance reflexives.'' San Diego: Academic Press.

Selected articles

*Cole, Peter & Harbert, Wayne & Sridhar, Shikaripur N. & Hashimoto, Sachiko & Nelson, Cecil & Smietana, Diane. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and island constraints. In Cole, Peter & Sadock, Jerrold M. (eds.), ''Grammatical relation''s (Syntax and Semantics 8), 27–46. New York: Academic Press. *Cole, Peter. 1983. Switch-reference in two Quechuan languages. In Haiman, John & Munro, Pamela (eds.), ''Switch-reference and universal grammar'', 1–16. Amsterdam: Benjamins. *Cole, Peter. 1987. The structure of internally headed relative clauses. ''Natural Language & Linguistic Theory'' 5(2). 277–302. *Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella & Sung, Li-May. 1990. Principles and parameters of long-distance reflexives. ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 1–22. *Cole, Peter & Son, Min-Jeong. 2004. The argument structure of verbs with the suffix -kan in Indonesian. Oceanic Linguistics 43(2). 339–364. *Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella & Huang, C.-T. James. 2006. Long-distance binding in Asian languages. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), ''The Blackwell companion to syntax'', 21–84. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (doi:10.1002/9780470996591.ch39) *Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella & Yanti. 2015. Grammar of binding in the languages of the world: Innate or learned? ''Cognition'' 141. 138–160. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.005) *McKinnon, Timothy & Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella. 2011. Object agreement and “pro-drop” in Kerinci Malay. ''Language'' 87(4). 715–750.

Notes

External links

Personal webpagePeter Cole (1941-2023) Curriculum Vitae
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cole, Peter 1941 births 2023 deaths University of Delaware faculty Linguists from the United States University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alumni