John R. Ross

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John Robert "Háj" Ross (born May 7, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a linguist who played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. Ross was a student of Bernard Bloch and Paul Postal at Yale University, Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania, and Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky at MIT.

Ross met Lakoff in 1963 and began collaborating with him especially on work by and influenced by Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT in the 1970-80s and has worked in Brazil. He is currently at the University of North Texas.

Ross' 1967 dissertation is very well-known for its contributions to syntactic theory. He has coined several new terms describing syntactic phenomena that he discovered, such as syntactic islands, parasitic gaps, pied piping, sluicing and slifting.

Like Roman Jakobson, Ross analyzes poetry using linguistics (see poetics).

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[edit] Bibliography

Harris, Randy Allen. (1995). The linguistics wars. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X.
Joseph, John; Swiggers, Pierre (Eds.). (2000). Biographical dictionary of western linguistics, 1450-present. London: Routledge.
Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. (1966). Criterion for verb phrase constituency. In Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. (1976). Is deep structure necessary?. In J. D. McCawley (Ed.), Syntax and semantics 7 (pp. 159-164).
Ross, John R. (1966). A proposed rule of tree-pruning. In Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
Ross, John R. (1966). Relativization in extraposed clauses. In Harvard Computation Laboratory Report to the National Science Foundation on Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation (No. NSF-17). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Computation Laboratory.
Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). (Published as Ross 1986). (Available online at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15166).
Ross, John R. (1967). On the cyclic nature of English pronominalization. In To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday (No. 3, pp. 1669-1682). The Hague: Mouton.
Ross, John R. (1969). Auxiliaries as main verbs. In W. Todd (Ed.), Studies in philosophical linguistics (Series 1). Evanston, IL: Great Expectations Press.
Ross, John R. (1970). On declarative sentences. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 222-272). Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Ross, John R. (1970). Gapping and the order of constituents. In M. Bierwisch & Karl E. Heidolph (Eds.), Progress in linguistics. The Hague: Mouton.
Ross, John R. (1972). Doubl-ing. In J. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 1, pp. 157-186). New York: Seminar Press.
Ross, John R. (1972). A reanalysis of English word stress (part I). In Michael K. Brame (Ed.), Contributions to generative phonology. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ross, John R. (1986). Infinite syntax!. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, ISBN 0-89391-042-2.