Why Linguists Aren't Postmodernists

Frederick (Fritz) Newmeyer is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. He has also been a visiting professor at Wayne State University (1976-77), the University of London (1979), Cornell University (1981), the University of Maryland (1982), UCLA (1982-83), Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages (1985), La Trobe University (1987), Universidade de São Paulo (1995), Universidad Nacional del Comahue (1997), the University of Illinois (1999), and Universiteit van Tilburg (2000).

He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax and is best known for his work on the history of generative syntax and for his arguments that linguistic formalism (i.e. generative grammar) and linguistic functionalism are not incompatible, but rather complementary. In the early 1990s he helped to renew interest in the evolutionary origin of language.

In this lecture, Newmeyer argues that facts about linguistic typology are better explained by parsing constraints than by the principles and parameters model of grammar.