Sad news has reached us of the death on May 10 of John Frampton, an important figure in linguistic research on both syntax and phonology for several decades, and a beloved member of the MIT Linguistics community — though he was neither faculty nor an alum of our department. John was an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University (across the river from us). In the 1990s, John became fascinated with recent developments in theoretical linguistics and started attending classes at MIT, most notably Chomsky’s famous Thursday afternoon lectures — where he was a prominent participant, the sharpest mind in the room, it always seemed. Always seated next to his friend, colleague, and linguistics collaborator Sam Gutmann (also a member of the mathematics faculty at Northeastern), whose interests had turned in the very same direction, John could be counted on to spot every error in Noam’s presentation, and (more important) every unsuspected consequence and interesting road not taken as well — roads that he explored in numerous influential papers over many years. In more recent years, John’s interests turned to phonology, where he was a strong advocate for rule-based phonological systems, authoring the monograph Distributed Reduplication (MIT Press) and many other publications. Many linguists who use LaTex to write their papers will also know John as the author of ExPex, a widely used, enormously flexible package for numbering and formatting example sentences and other illustrative material — specifically designed for linguistics.
His daughter Prof. Stephanie Ann Frampton is an MIT colleague, a member of the Classics faculty in the Literature section and co-chair of the Program in Ancient and Medieval studies. She writes that John spent his last months, aware that his health was failing, finishing papers on prosody in Winnebago and Arabic, and adds: “Whether he was in agreement or disagreement with trends of linguistic theory among the faculty, John took enormous inspiration from being a member of the linguistics community at MIT for over three decades.” We in turn took enormous inspiration from John, who followed his intellectual passions wherever they led him with the most rigorous honesty, sparkling creativity, and insistence that the results should make sense. A great loss, we will miss him.
His daughter requests “in lieu of flowers, please send donations to the ACLU in his memory: https://action.aclu.org/give/make-gift-aclu-someones-memory”.
