Andrew Radford (linguist) explained

Andrew Radford
Birth Date:3 July 1945
Birth Place:Woking
Fields:Generative grammar, syntax, child language acquisition
Workplaces:University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of East Anglia, University College of North Wales, University of Essex
Alma Mater:Trinity College, Cambridge
Doctoral Advisor:Pieter Seuren

a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen

Known For:Generative grammar, Principles and Parameters of language development, structure building model of child language acquisition

Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax.[1] He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by an introduction to transformational grammar in 1988,[2] which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

In the 1990s, Radford was a pioneer of the maturation-based structure building model of child language, and the acquisition of functional categories in early child English within the Principles and Parameters framework,[3] [4] in which children are seen as gradually building up more and more complex structures, with lexical categories (like noun and verb) being acquired before functional-syntactic categories (like determiner and complementiser): this research resulted in the publication of a monograph on Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax in 1990, and numerous articles on the acquisition of syntax by monolingual, bilingual and language-disordered children.

Since 2010, Radford has researched the syntax of colloquial English, using data recorded from unscripted radio and TV broadcasts. He produced a research monograph on this, and a number of articles, and is preparing a follow-up research monograph on the syntax of relative clauses in colloquial English.[5] [6]

Since January 2014, Radford has been an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.[7]

Education

Radford was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, reading Modern Languages (French, Italian and Romanian), Linguistics and Romance Philology. He graduated with a first-class degree and was awarded a research scholarship by Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed a PhD on Italian syntax there, supervised by Pieter Seuren.

Career

Radford was a Research Fellow in Linguistics at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1971 to 1975, before taking up posts as lecturer in Linguistics in the School of English & American Studies at the University of East Anglia (1975–76), Lecturer in Linguistics in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford (1976–78), and Reader in Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex (1978–80). In 1980, he became Professor of Linguistics at the University College of North Wales, serving first as Head of the Department of Linguistics (1980–87), and later as Head of the School of Modern Languages and Linguistics (1987–89). In 1989, he returned to the University of Essex as Professor of Linguistics, where he served three terms as Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics, and one as Dean of the School of Humanities and Comparative Studies. He retired at the end of 2013, and has been Emeritus Professor at Essex since then.

He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Child Language, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, Studies in Language Sciences, Chomskyan Studies, Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, and Iberia. He also served two spells as a member of the Linguistics Review Panel for the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Structure building model

In his 1990 book, Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax,[8] Radford summarizes the state of a maturation hypothesis for child language acquisition.[9] Working within the principles and parameters framework[10] as his point of departure, and drawing from previous work done by Hagit Borer and Kenneth Wexler[11] on the apparent absence of A-chains in early grammar, Radford proposed a structure-building model focused (inter alia) on the lack of syntactic movement-operations in the early multi-word stage of child English syntax, viz. the lack of inflectional morphology. This led to an analysis that described children as gradually building up increasingly complex structure, with Lexical/thematic stage-1 (lexical categories like noun and verb) preceding Functional/syntactic stage-2 (functional categories like determiner and complementiser).

Publications

Books by Radford

Books cowritten by Radford

Other selected publications (2012–)

External links

Notes and References

  1. 4175462. Review: Italian Syntax: Transformational and Relational Grammar. Rebecca Posner. 1978. Journal of Linguistics. 14. 2. 356–366.
  2. Baltin. Mark. Review: Transformational Grammar. 414616. 1990-09-25. Language. 66. 3. 569–573. 10.2307/414616.
  3. Book: What is Language Development. 978-0-19-2632487. James Russell. 2004. Oxford University Press .
  4. Book: The Acquisition of German. 978-3-11-026376-3. Anne Vainikka and Martha Young-Scholten. 2011. Walter de Gruyter .
  5. See (2012a, 2013, 2015b) within "Other selected publications".
  6. http://www.cambridge.org/jp/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/grammar-and-syntax/colloquial-english-structure-and-variation Colloquial English: Structure and Variation
  7. "People: Professor Andrew Radford". University of Essex.
  8. Book: Radford, Andrew. 1990. Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax. Blackwell. 978-0-631-16358-9.
  9. Joseph Galasso, "Synopsis of the Structure-building model of Andrew Radford (1990): And other maturational hypotheses leading to child development theories of the time" (MS, California State University Northridge, 2017).
  10. [Noam Chomsky]
  11. Hagit Borer and Kenneth Wexler, "The maturation of Syntax" (1983); in Thomas Roeper and Edwin Williams (eds), Parameter Setting (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 2013), pp. 123–172.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Andrew Radford (linguist)".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.