II. Obituary: H. Allan Gleason JR. 1917-2007
Message 1: Obituary: H. Allan Gleason Jr. 1917-2007
Date: 24-Jan-2007
From: William Forrest <lingdept chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Obituary: H. Allan Gleason Jr. 1917-2007
«…It is with regret that the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto announces that Professor Emeritus Henry Alan Gleason passed away on January 13, at the age of 89. He was a major figure in American linguistics in the last half of the past century. He is survived by his wife of over 65 years, Frances Everett, son and daughter-in-law Henry and Jan Gleason, and a daughter Martha, and many other loving family members. A memorial service will be held in El Paso Texas on January 25.
Henry Allan Gleason, Jr., came to the University of Toronto in 1967 as a Professor on the graduate faculty of the Department of English and in the newly-formed Centre for Linguistic Studies. He had previously been a visiting professor in India for two years, and before that he was a Professor of Linguistics at the Hartford Seminary Foundation where he also received his doctorate. He was known as a captivating lecturer and teacher, and an amazing storyteller. His international reputation rested largely on his Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1955 and revised in 1965. That book was the first introductory textbook to gain general acceptance, and for some twenty-five years it provided the rudiments of linguistic analysis. One could argue that the textbook defined the field, distinguishing it in content and methodology from the disciplines in which linguists of that time were located: anthropology, rhetoric, grammar, language teaching, and translation. Accompanying the textbook was his Workbook in Descriptive Linguistics, also published by HRW in 1955 and revised in 1967. The exercises contained in the workbook provided practice exercises for students based on data from many languages from all parts of the world, and provided a paradigm for teaching the discipline that exists to this day. At the University of Toronto, Professor Gleason taught a graduate seminar called Structures of English for literature students and a number of courses in the Linguistics department, from the introductory course to specialist courses in Hindi analysis. Professor Gleason was also a lay pastor who had served as a missionary in his younger days as far afield as Appalachia and Punjab. One of his hobbies was church history, and he spent many weekends while he lived in Toronto (and everywhere else he lived) prowling the countryside seeking the folk history of obscure denominations. He retired at age 65 in 1982….»Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
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III. THE MAIN FEATURES OF WORK
Linguistics 101: An Introduction to the Study of Language
Part One: Introduction to Linguistics
Every human knows at least one language, spoken or signed. Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli.
The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax, the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary. For the most part, there is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.
Knowing a language encompasses this entire system, but this knowledge (called competence) is different from behavior (called performance.) You may know a language, but you may also choose to not speak it. Although you are not speaking the language, you still have the knowledge of it. However, if you don't know a language, you cannot speak it at all.
There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive grammars represent the unconscious knowledge of a language. English speakers, for example, know that "me likes apples" is incorrect and "I like apples" is correct, although the speaker may not be able to explain why. Descriptive grammars do not teach the rules of a language, but rather describe rules that are already known. In contrast, prescriptive grammarsdictate what a speaker's grammar should be and they include teaching grammars, which are written to help teach a foreign language. There are about 5,000 languages in the world right now (give or take a few thousand), and linguists have discovered that these languages are more alike than different from each other. There are universal concepts and properties that are shared by all languages, and these principles are contained in the Universal Grammar, which forms the basis of all possible human languages.
Part Two: Morphology and Syntax
Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a word.