Peter Hugoe Matthews, FBA (born 1934) is a British linguist and historian of linguistics. He is a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and was formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

(1980–2000). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. Matthews is perhaps best known for his writings on linguistic morphology. He has published two monographs on the subject. Matthews was an early follower 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 ...

, but lost enthusiasm for the "generative enterprise" during the 1960s. He has described the Chomskyan revolution as "the Best Thing that has happened to linguistics in the past 2500 years". But he also writes, that dominance of various Chomskyan ideas is not "a Good Thing, and I would not be disappointed if my study of their origins were to lead more scholars to question them".

Selected publications

* ''Inflectional Morphology: A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation'' (1972) * '' Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word-structure'' (1974, 2nd revd edition 1991) * ''Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence'' (1979) * '' Syntax'' (1981) * ''Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky'' (1993) * '' A Short History of Structural Linguistics'' (2001) * '' Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction'' (2003) * '' The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics'' (2005) * '' Syntactic Relations: A Critical Survey'' (2007) * ''The Positions of Adjectives in English'' (2014)

References

1934 births Living people Linguists from the United Kingdom Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Fellows of the British Academy Morphologists Syntacticians {{UK-linguist-stub