Frank R. Palmer

Frank Robert Palmer ( April 9, 1922 - November 1, 2019 ) was a British linguist , author of scientific publications and professor emeritus from the University of Reading .

Live and act

He lived with his parents in Kendleshire ( South Gloucestershire ). Palmer received his first education at the Hambrook School (in Hambrook). He was registered there in the Admission Register 1922-1946 with the day of his school enrollment for Monday, August 30, 1926. On September 2, 1932, he moved to the Bristol Grammar School . Palmer later went to New College , Oxford .

In the 1940s, Palmer was a member of the British Army with the rank of lieutenant . After the end of the Second World War, he took over the position of professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from the beginning to the end of the 1950s . There he was encouraged by John Rupert Firth - he was head of department at the time - to get involved in research in a number of African and Oriental languages, along with a number of his other employees and students, who would later become well-known linguists. Terence Frederick Mitchell worked on Arabic and the Berber languages, Palmer on the Ethiopian languages, Michael Halliday on Chinese and Richard Keith Sprigg (1922–2011) specialized in the phonology of Asian languages. Later, towards the end of the 1960s, Palmer sought the posthumous publication of important works by JR Firth.

Palmer and his wife Jean Elisabeth had their son Robert George (born November 8, 1950) baptized on December 31, 1950.

In 1952 he went on a research trip to Ethiopia to study languages. He studied the Ethiopian languages Tigre , Bilin , Amharic and the language of the Agau from the group of Cushitic languages . In addition, he worked with Latin , Greek and several European languages ​​as well as Arabic .

In 1960 he was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University in Wales , Linguistic Science at the University of Bangor .

Together with John Lyons , he published the two-volume work Semantics in 1976 .

Palmer was Professor of the Linguistic Science at the University of Reading in the English city of Reading . He drew the following memberships, Fellow for the British Academy and the Academia Europaea . By 1955 he drew membership in the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).

He performed his official academic duties teaching and researching linguistics from 1965 to 1987 at the University of Reading. Palmer was the editor of the Journal of Linguistics from 1969 to 1979.

His main research interests were language theory as well as the English and Ethiopian languages . As a linguist, he taught and researched in a large number of countries. In 1981 he was visiting professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in Beijing during his stay in the People's Republic of China .

Frank R. Palmer's analysis of the modality

The Palmerian analysis and reflection on the modality from (1979) Modality and the English Modals and especially in the comprehensive form from (1986) Mood and Modality are groundbreaking for the understanding of the modality not only in the English language . Palmer (2001) regards modality as a grammatical category, a category related to tense and aspect . While the tense and aspect refer to the temporal classification or the internal temporal course of the event, the modality listed the status of the proposition of an event.

He classified the different types of modality as follows:

Propositional modality

• Epistemic modality
• Evidentiality

Event modality

• Deontic modality
• Dynamic modality
  • neutral dynamic modality
  • subjective dynamic modality

According to Palmer, however, the two main groups are the propositional and event modality.

The term deontic comes from logic (compare also the terminology from propositional logic and modal logic ) and is used in linguistics for an obligation and permission. Deontic modality concerns the necessity or possibility of actions and events carried out by morally responsible agents.

Works (selection)

• Mood and Modality . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986, ISBN 0-521-31930-7 .
• Modals and Actuality. In: Journal of Linguistics. Volume 13, 1977, pp. 1-23.
• Modality and the English Modals. Longman, London 1979.
• with John Lyons: Semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981, ISBN 0-521-28376-0 .
• Literature and Moral Understanding: Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture. Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-824232-8 .
• Grammatical Roles and Relations. (= Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics ). Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-521-45836-8 .
• The English Verb. Longman Linguistics Library, 1988, ISBN 0-582-29714-1 .
• The Verb Classes of Agaw (Awiya). In: Communications from the Institute for Orient Research. Volume 7.2, Berlin 1959, pp. 270-297.
• Bilin “to be” and “to have”. In: African Language Studies. Volume 6, 1965, pp. 101-111.
• Word classes in Bilin. In: Lingua. 17 (1-2), 1966, pp. 200-209.
• An outline of Bilin phonology. In: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma 2-4 April 1959). Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome 1960, pp. 109-116.
• The Morphology of the Tigre Noun. (= London oriental series. 13). Routledge Curzon, 1962, OCLC 4320882 .
• The noun in bilin. In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Volume 21, 1958, pp. 376-391.
• 'Openness' in Tigre: a problem in prosodic statement. " In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Volume 18/3, pp. 561-577.
• Relative clauses in Tigre. In: Word. Volume 17/1, 1961, pp. 23-33.
• with Theodora Bynon (Ed.): Studies in the history of linguistic science: a festschrift for RH Robins. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Lexical aspect in English. Selected Papers from the 18th ISTAL, 2009, pp. 1-15.
• The broken plurals of Tigrinya . 1955.
• The derived forms of the Tigrinya verb. 1960.
• Some remarks on the grammar and phonology of the 'compound verbs' in Cushitic and Ethiopian Semitic. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Problemi attuali di scienza e di cultura, quaderno n.191, Roma 1974, pp. 71-77.
• Negation and modality in the Germanic languages. In: T. Swan, OJ Westvik (Ed.): Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Berlin 1997.

German translations (selection)

• Grammar and grammar theory. translated by Christoph Gutknecht. CH Beck, Munich 1974
• Semantics. An introduction. translated by Christoph Gutknecht. CH Beck, Munich 1977

Web links

• Literature by and about Frank R. Palmer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait of Frank R. Palmer
• LibraryThing. RF Palmer
• Frank R. Palmer: Lexical aspect in English. University of Reading. (2009) Selected Papers from the 18th ISTAL, pp. 1-33.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hambrook School Admission Register 1922–1946. via www.frenchaymuseumarchives.co.uk
2. ^ Oxford Index.
3. ↑ Frank Palmer on ae-info.org
4. ↑ Kendleshire is a scattered settlement in South Gloucestershire, England. Between Winterbourne Down and Henfield.
5. ↑ the place Hambrook (South Gloucestershire) is located between two larger parishes Winterbourne and Frenchay
6. ^ In the Admission Register 1922-1946 it was noted: Won scholarship for Bristol Grammar School
7. ^ Frank R. Palmer (Ed.): Selected papers of John Rupert Firth (1952-59). Longman and Indiana University Press, London / Bloomington 1968.
8. ^ Winterbourne Parish Records - Frenchay Museum & Archives, www.frenchaymuseumarchives.co.uk
9. ↑ Anastasios Tsangalidēs; Roberta Facchinetti; Frank Robert Palmer: Studies on English Modality: In Honor of Frank Palmer. (= Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication. Volume 111). Peter Lang, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-3-0343-0310-1 , p. 9 f.
10. ^ Official website of Bangor University, Linguistics
11. ↑ book excerptise. Grammar Frank Robert Palmer. párrafo --bio
12. ^ Official website of Reading University
13. ↑ LSA member list
14. ↑ Short biography of the Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
15. ↑ Per N. Döhler: Semantics and Pragmatics of Modality in English. ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on: triacom.com 
16. ^ Charles W. Kreidler: Introducing English Semantics. Routledge, London / New York 1998, ISBN 0-415-18063-5 , pp. 95 and 248 ( online , PDF)
17. ↑ Terence Langendoen: Palmer, Mood and Modality 2nd ed.LINGUIST List 12.2018, Fri Aug 10 2001.
18. ^ Frank R. Palmer: Mood and Modality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) 2001.
19. ↑ see or compare epistemic logic .
20. ↑ Evidentiality. Norbert Fries: Online Lexicon Linguistics. Berlin 2006 ff. ( Memento of the original dated May 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
21. ↑ see or compare Deontic Logic .