Sad news has reached us of the passing of our very distinguished alum Stephen R. Anderson (PhD 1969), a foundational contributor to many areas of linguistics, especially phonology and morphology. Steve belonged to one of the first generations of graduate students in our department, and had a a long and illustrious career serving our field in many capacities: research, teaching, administration, popularization. He held professorships at Harvard, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins — and finished his career as the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics (and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science) at Yale from 1994 to his retirement in 2017, serving as Linguistics department chair for many years, and helping to revitalize the department in many ways.
Throughout his long career, Steve worked on foundational issues in phonology and morphology — focusing on the ways in which underlying grammatical structure is revealed and expressed in phonological form, but also on important issues in syntax and the place of human language in human cognition and across species more generally. Steve also conducted original fieldwork on a variety of languages including Kwakiutl and Abkhaz. To name just a few of his contributions to the most basic questions of the field:
- the interaction or separation between basic grammatical modules (morphology and phonology (below b); phonology and phonetics (LI 1981:493ff); morphology and syntax: LI 1982:571ff; Amorphous Morphology CUP 1992)
- a broad classification of phonological rules by the amount of morpho-syntactic information they must refer to: J.Linguistics 1:181ff
- the principles that govern rule ordering (thesis and papers on ‘local ordering’ in the 1970s: LI 1970:387ff; LI 1972:253ff; and his groundbreaking first book The Organization of Phonology Academic Press 1974). This line of research later led to the realization that the phonological cycle applies to segmental processes, not just to stress rules.
- what properties define human language and how animal communication differs, or doesn’t: Dr.Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language 2004 Yale U Press
- whether languages with ergative morphological patterns (treating subject of intransitive verbs on a par with direct objects) differ deeply in syntax from languages that lack this property (his answer: “no!”); “On the notion of subject in ergative languages” in Charles Li. (ed) Subject and Topic) 1976 Academic Press
- whether language universals are or could be emergent consequences of factors unrelated to a human language organ: Yearbook of Morphology 2004, 1–17
Two of Anderson’s ideas are now part of the background knowledge most linguists share, without always associating his name with them:
- autosegmental behavior is not limited to tone but extends to segmental features, including [±nasal] and [±continuant] (Language 1976:326ff);
- the morphosyntactic functions of inflectional morphemes are not underlyingly linked exclusively to any specific exponent: Amorphous Morphology 1992 CUP.
Alongside his many research contributions, Steve was a superb citizen of the field, serving as President of the Linguistic Society of America and in leadership capacities in many other organizations, including the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes and the AAAS. Alongside his many publications that expanded our understanding of language itself, he was a pioneering historian of the field, with an abiding interest in the different ways a given phenomenon could be viewed—pursued in his masterful Phonology in the 20th Century. Never a follower (or promoter) of fashion, Steve Anderson was universally respected as a scholar’s scholar and linguist’s linguist. We miss him and honor his memory.
Webpage: https://www.sranderson.net
MIT dissertation: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12964
Yale tribute on the occasion of his retirement: https://fas.yale.edu/…/faculty…/stephen-r-anderson
