Charles J. Fillmore

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Charles John Fillmore (born August 9, 1929 in St. Paul , Minnesota - † February 13, 2014 in San Francisco ) was an American linguist . He was the founder of case grammar and frame semantics and was one of the founders and most important representatives of construction grammar . Outside of linguistics in the narrower sense, his work on frame semantics also had an important influence on lexicography methods .

Career

Fillmore received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1961 . From 1961 to 1971 he was Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University . From 1971 until his retirement he was Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley . Most recently he was the head of the FrameNet project. Since 1984 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He died of cancer on February 13, 2014.

In the early phase of his career, Fillmore developed his theory of case grammar within the framework of transformation grammar , which assumed that every noun phrase in a sentence has a so-called deep case that determines its syntactic behavior. Fillmore soon replaced his idea of ​​deep case from transformation grammar and developed it further into a more general theory of semantic roles as part of his frame semantics . Fillmore was initially no longer primarily interested in the grammatical properties of semantic roles. When frame semantics were later integrated into the most important versions of construction grammar, the relationship between the semantic role and the syntactic behavior of noun phrases came back into the focus of his research.

Works (selection)

  • "The Case for Case." In E. Bach and R. Harms (eds.): Universals in Linguistic Theory . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968, pp. 1-88.
  • with BT Atkins: Towards a frame-based lexicon: the case of RISK. In: A. Lehrer and E. Kittay (eds.): Frames, Fields, and Contrasts. New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1992, pp. 75-102.
  • "Corpus linguistics" vs. "Computer-aided armchair linguistics". In J. Svartvik (ed.): Directions in Corpus Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992, pp. 35-60.
  • Humor in academic discourse. In AD Grimshaw and PJ Burke (eds.): What's going on here? Complementary studies of professional talks. Norwood NJ: Ablex, 1994, pp. 271-310.
  • with BT Atkins: Starting where the dictionaries stop: the challenge of corpus lexicography. In BT Atkins and A. Zampolli (eds.): Computational Approaches to the Lexicon. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 349-393.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Language Log
personal data
SURNAME Fillmore, Charles J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fillmore, Charles John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American linguist
DATE OF BIRTH August 9, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Paul, Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2014
Place of death San Francisco