SAnderson

Personal

Bio

Stephen R. Anderson is the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, and also Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Cognitive Science major in Yale College.  His research examines how the structure of language can contribute to a broader study of the structure of the mind. He 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."  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. He 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 and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988-1989. He is also a founding member of Project Steve, an initiative by a group of scientists -- all with the first name of Steve -- to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools.

 

URL

http://bloch.ling.yale.edu/