David M. Perlmutter

Professor Emeritus of Linguistics. Perlmutter is a versatile and influential linguist, best known as the founder, with Paul Postal, of relational grammar (RG). RG challenged then-prevailing Chomskyan doctrine on syntax, positing grammatical relations (subject/object) as primary syntactic notions, and not Chomskyesque derivatives from word-order representations. Perlmutter authored nine key chapters in Studies in Relational Grammar 1 and 2 (1983/1984), presenting RG's principles and demonstrating their utility in solving problems in a wide range of languages. This work and his in-depth studies of Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages and (with others) of selected Asian and Native American languages were instrumental in moving syntactic theory from reliance primarily on data from English to accountability for cross-linguistic data. With Scott Soames he co-authored Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English (1979,) which honed methods of argumentation for linguists. His work on American Sign Language (ASL) argued that signing, like speech, is organized into syllables. The goal of his teaching has been to enable students to experience the thrill of making a discovery, and to experience it again and again. He mentored and shaped a whole generation of syntactic investigators and teachers of linguistics. He also brought an awareness of language, linguistics, and sign language to a wider audience through his course on ASL that attracted 300-400 students each year. Perlmutter is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, which he has served as President.