Carlota Smith (May 21, 1934,

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

-May 24, 2007,

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

) was an American linguist. She was professor of linguistics at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

for 38 years. Smith received her M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1967) in linguistics at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, studying under

Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...

. In 1969, she joined the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at University of Texas at Austin, where she served for the remainder of her life. She was department chair from 1981-1985. She was named the Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in the Humanities in 1991. During her long career, she made important contributions to three areas of linguistic research. Her early work examined English syntax and child

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

. (Shipley et al. 1969 was an influential paper in this area.) She wrote a number of papers and a widely cited book (Smith 1991) on

grammatical aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...

. A final research interest involved the analysis of

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...

units above the level of the sentence, which she categorizes, in Smith (2003) into five ‘discourse modes’ (narrative, report, description, information, and argument). She spent many years doing linguistic research on Navajo and became a member of the Navajo Language Academy.

Selected publications

*Elizabeth F. Shipley, Carlota S. Smith and Lila R. Gleitman. 1969. A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands. ''Language'' 45: 322-342. *Carlota S. Smith. 1991. ''The parameter of aspect''. Kluwer. *Carlota S. Smith. 2003. ''Modes of discourse: the local structure of texts''. Cambridge University Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Carlota 1934 births 2007 deaths Linguists from the United States People from New York City University of Pennsylvania alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty Women linguists 20th-century linguists