John Goldsmith (linguist)

John Anton Goldsmith (born 1951) is an American linguist. He is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science.^[1][2]

John Goldsmith
Born	1951 (age 73–74)
Alma mater	Swarthmore College (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Awards	Fellow of the AAAS
Scientific career
Fields	Phonology, Generative grammar
Institutions	University of Chicago, Indiana University
Doctoral advisor	Morris Halle

Biography

Goldsmith obtained his B.A. at Swarthmore College in 1972, and completed his PhD in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1976, under the linguist Morris Halle.^[3] He was on the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University^[4] before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at many universities, such as McGill, Harvard, and UCSD. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[5]

Research

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics.^[6] His PhD thesis introduced autosegmental phonology; the idea that phonological phenomena is a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments, each representing certain features of speech.^[7] His more recent research focuses on unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (as demonstrated by the Linguistica project,^[8] a body of software that tries to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Books

• John A Goldsmith, Bernard Laks, Battle in the Mind Fields, University of Chicago Press, 2018

External links

• Goldsmith's homepage Archived 2009-12-04 at the Wayback Machine
• Autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith's doctoral dissertation)
• Goldsmith's 2014 lecture at the University of Chicago