Arnold M. Zwicky (born September 6, 1940) is a perennial visiting professor of
linguistics
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. Ling ...
at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
, and
Distinguished University Professor
Professors in the United States commonly occupy any of several positions of teaching and research within a college or university. In the U.S., the word "professor" informally refers collectively to the academic ranks of assistant professor, asso ...
Emeritus of linguistics at the
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...
.
Early life and education
Zwicky was born on September 6, 1940, in Allentown,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
. He received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Princeton University (1962). He was a student of
Morris Halle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (
MIT) and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in 1965.
Career
Zwicky has made notable contributions to fields of
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 ...
(
half-rhymes),
morphology (
realizational morphology
Realizational morphology or "word-and-paradigm" (WP) was a theory first created by linguist, Charles F. Hockett. WP morphology focuses on the whole of a word rather than morphemes or internal structure. This theory also denies that morphemes are si ...
, rules of referral),
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
(
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s,
construction grammar
Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
), interfaces (the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax),
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of ...
and American
dialectology Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , '' -logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their ass ...
.
He coined the term "
recency illusion
The recency illusion is the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when it is long-established. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University primarily interested in examples involving wor ...
", the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction or phrase is of recent origin when it is in fact of long-established usage. For example, the figurative use of the intensifier "literally" is often perceived to have recent origin, but in fact it dates back several centuries. The phenomenon is thought to be caused by
selective attention
Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attenti ...
.
At the
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: '' Language'' ...
's 1999 Summer Institute (held at
UIUC) he was the Edward Sapir professor, the most prestigious chair of this organization, of which he is a past president.
He is one of the editors of ''Handbook of Morphology'', among other published works. He is also well known as a frequent contributor to the linguistics blog
Language Log
''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search f ...
, as well as his own personal blog that largely focuses on linguistics issues.
Zwicky is a former board member of the
National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, who chose him as 2008 GLBT Scientist of the Year.
Selected publications
* 1977: ''On Clitics''. Indiana University Linguistics Club.
* 1983: Cliticization vs. Inflection: English ''n't''. With
Geoffrey K. Pullum
Geoffrey Keith Pullum (; born 8 March 1945) is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Pullum is a co-author of ''The Cambridge Gram ...
''Language'' 59 (3), 502–513.
* 1985: Clitics and Prticles. ''Language'' 61 (2), 283–305.
* 1987: Suppressing the Zs. ''Journal of Linguistics'' Vol. 23 (1), 133–148.
* 1996: ''Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena.'' Edited with Aaron L. Halpern. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
* 2001: ''The Handbook of Morphology.'' Edited with Andrew Spencer. Hoboken: Wiley.
See also
*
LGBT people in science
References
External links
Arnold Zwicky's blogArnold Zwicky on Stanford Profiles
Linguists from the United States
Stanford University Department of Linguistics faculty
Ohio State University faculty
Living people
LGBT scientists from the United States
Phonologists
Morphologists
Syntacticians
Sociolinguists
Dialectologists
Linguistic Society of America presidents
1940 births
21st-century LGBT people
Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
{{US-linguist-stub