Peter Matthews (Linguist)

Peter Matthews (* 1934 ) is a British linguist . He went to St John's College in Cambridge and was professor and from 1980 to 2000 chairman of the linguistics department at Cambridge University .

Matthews is known for his writings on morphology , a field in which he also published two individual works.

He was an early follower of Noam Chomsky , but distanced himself from generative grammar during the 1960s , and soon became a sharp critic of Chomsky.

Publications (selection)

• Inflectional Morphology: A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation (1972)
• Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word-structure (1974)
• Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence (1979)
• Syntax (1981)
• Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky (1993)
• A Short History of Structural Linguistics (2001)
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (2005)