Ray C. Dougherty (born 1940) is an American linguist and was a member of the Arts and Science faculty at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

until 2014 (retired). He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

in the early 1960s and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 th ...

in 1968. At MIT, Dougherty was one of the first students 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 i ...

, working in the field of transformational grammar. During the

Linguistics Wars The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doct ...

of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic 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 generat ...

movement. Specializing in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

, Dougherty has published several books and articles on the subject. In recent years, Dougherty has become interested in the study of

biolinguistics Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to e ...

, focusing on the role of the

cochlea The cochlea is the part of the inner ear involved in hearing. It is a spiral-shaped cavity in the bony labyrinth, in humans making 2.75 turns around its axis, the modiolus. A core component of the cochlea is the Organ of Corti, the sensory o ...

in the evolution of animal communication systems and naturalistic applications of

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

. Dougherty has made numerous contributions to advancing the study of

semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...

at New York University.

Select publications

*"A grammar of coordinate conjoined structures, Part I," 1970, ''Language'' 46: 850. *"A grammar of coordinate conjoined structures, Part II," 1971, ''Language'' 47: 298. *"Generative semantics methods: A Bloomfieldian counterrevolution," 1974, ''International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics'' 3: 255. *"Harris and Chomsky at the Syntax-Semantics Boundary," 1975, In D. Hockney (ed.), ''Contemporary Research In Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics'', (Dordrecht: Reidel). *"Einstein and Chomsky on scientific methodology," 1976, ''Linguistics'' 167: 5. *"An Information-Theoretical Model of Grammar Reproduction," 1979, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. *"Current Views of Language and Grammar," 1983, In F. Machlup & U. Mansfield (eds.), ''The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages'', (New York: Wiley). *''Digital Signal Processing'', 1984 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall) (with William D. Stanley and Gary R. Dougherty). *"Language learning machines," 1987, ''Semiotic Inquiry'' 8: 27. *''Natural Language Computing: An English Generative Grammar in Prolog'', 1994 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Press). *"Strings, Lists and Intonation in Garden Path Sentences: ''Can it'', ''Plan it'', or ''planet''?" 2004, In C. Leclère, É. Laporte, M. Piot, & M. Silberztein (eds.), ''Syntax, Lexis & Lexicon-Grammar: Papers in Honour of Maurice Gross'', (Philadelphia: John Benjamins). *"Information Theory Defines 'Mathematically Conceivable Communication System'," 2007, Proceedings of the Biolinguistic Investigations Conference, Santo Domingo. *"A Minimalist Theory of Auditory Interfaces: Why the Larynx Descended," 2007, Proceedings of the Biolinguistic Investigations Conference, Santo Domingo (with Garrett Neske).

Select publications

See also