Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in
Weehawken
Weehawken is a township in the northern part of Hudson County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is located largely on the Hudson Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 17,197. ,
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
The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven Upper divis ...
. In 1967 he was appointed to a research position at
IBM and he remained on their research staff until 1994.
An important figure in the early development of
generative grammar, he became a proponent of the
generative semantics
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generati ...
movement along with
George Lakoff
George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...
,
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
Haj Ross
John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was ...
. In the 1970s, with David M. Perlmutter, he developed
Relational Grammar. Later, with
David E. Johnson
David E. Johnson (born December 21, 1946 in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American linguist. He is the co-inventor of arc pair grammar.
Work
Johnson is best known for his work on relational grammar, especially the development with Paul Postal ...
, he developed
Arc Pair Grammar. These non-transformational theories of grammar have had an indirect but major impact on modern syntactic analysis.
Since his involvement with generative semantics, he has been a vocal critic of
Noam Chomsky and work done in Chomsky's frameworks.
[Harris, Randy Allen (1993). ''The Linguistics Wars.'' Oxford: OUP. ]
Selected bibliography
*Postal, Paul M. (1968). ''Aspects of phonological theory''. New York: Harper & Row.
*Postal, Paul M. (1972). "The best theory". In S. Peters (Ed.), ''Goals of linguistic theory''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
*Postal, Paul M. (1974) ''On Raising: One Rule of English Grammar and Its Theoretical Implications''. Cambridge: MIT Press.
*Johnson, David E.; & Postal, Paul M. (1980). ''Arc pair grammar.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press.
*
Culicover, P. W., & Postal, Paul M. (2000). ''Parasitic gaps''. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
*Postal, Paul M. (2003).
Policing the Content of Linguistic Examples. Language. 79 (1), 182-188.
*Postal, Paul M. ''Skeptical linguistic essays'' (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
References
External links
NYU)
criticism of Chomsky by Postal
1936 births
Living people
Linguists from the United States
Syntacticians
New York University faculty
{{US-linguist-stub