 | Stephen Anderson |
Stephen R. Anderson, the newly named Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics, examines how the structure of language can contribute to a broader study of the structure of the mind.
He is also professor of psychology and chair of the Program in Cognitive Science, which concerns the study of how organisms (especially humans) acquire, recognize, use and manipulate information.
Anderson has studied Scandinavian, Romance, Celtic, Caucasian and American Indian languages, and is currently doing research on a form of Rumantsch, one of the four national tongues of Switzerland, under a grant from the National Science Foundation. He has devoted most of his attention to a theory of morphology (the structure of words) that emphasizes knowledge of relations among words, rather than the units that make up those words.
He is also interested in the nature of communication in animals and its relation to the cognitive abilities underlying human language -- the topic of his book "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language," which won the Association of American Publisher's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the Best Book in Psychology in 2004. His other books are "The Organization of Phonology," "Phonology in the 20th Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations," "A-Morphous Morphology," "The Language Organ: Linguistics as Cognitive Physiology" (with David Lightfoot) and, most recently, "Aspects of the Theory of Clitics."
After studying mathematics at the University of Chicago, Anderson earned a B.S. in linguistics and mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in linguistics and philosophy from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He came to Yale in 1994 from Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Maryland. He chaired Yale's Department of Linguistics 1995-2004 and since 1996 has been a member of the board of directors of Haskins Laboratories, an independent research institute in New Haven that focuses on the biological bases of speech and language.
Anderson was recently elected as the 83rd president of the Linguistic Society of America and will assume the post in 2007. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on task forces and committees for the National Science Foundation; was an ex officio member of the board of directors of the Endangered Language Fund; and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988-1989. He is also a founding member of the Steve Project, an initiative by a group of scientists -- all with the first name of Steve -- to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools.
T H I S
Stephen Anderson named
Diebold Professor of Linguistics
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ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS
Stephen Anderson named Diebold Professor of Linguistics
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Campus Notes
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