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 New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

) is an American linguist.

Biography

Postal received his PhD from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1963 and taught at

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 ...

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 Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...

, he became a proponent of the generative semantics 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 In linguistics, relational grammar (RG) is a syntactic theory which argues that primitive grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state syntactic rules in universal terms. Relational grammar began as an alternative to transformational gra ...

. 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 Posta ...

, he developed

Arc Pair Grammar In linguistics, arc pair grammar (APG) is a theory of syntax that aims to formalize and expand upon relational grammar. It primarily builds upon the relational grammar concept of an arc, but also makes use of more formally stated ideas from model t ...

. 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 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 is ...

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