Eric Schiller

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Dr Eric Schiller (born March 20, 1955 in New York) is an American chess player, trainer, arbiter and author. He is also a Ph.D. in Linguistics, specializing in Cambodian languages.

Contents

[edit] Chess career

Dr Schiller is a FIDE Master and in the July 2006 FIDE list had an Elo rating of 2197. He is also an International Arbiter who speaks Russian fluently; Schiller was arbiter of the 2000 World Chess Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik.

Schiller has organized many chess tournaments, including the World Youth Championship in Chicago, and several international tournaments in Hawaii. He has often been a news reporter, reporting on Olympiads and World Chess Championship matches.He is a popular and well respected member of the CHESSGAMES.COM community where enthusiasts ask him frequent questions re rules and openings fields.Dr Schiller was the arbiter for the third Staunton Memorial tournament London 2005, missed 2006 because of ill health, but has been invited back as arbiter for 2007.Dr Schiller has also arbited at the Gibtelecom tournament in Gibraltar.

Schiller is noted as a prolific author of chess books, having written over 100, more than anyone else except Fred Reinfeld, Raymond Keene, and the late Eduard Gufeld. However, some of the books have received scathing reviews: Reviewing for the Chess Cafe, Carsten Hansen said Schiller's tome on the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game was "by far THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN" [1], while Tony Miles' famous review of Unorthodox Chess Openings for Kingpin consisted of two words: "Utter crap." Others, however, have found some of Schiller's output to be well suited to its amateur audience. John L. Watson said of Complete Defense to King Pawn Openings and Complete Defense to Queen Pawn Openings that "these books are explicitly aimed at the developing student, not the advanced player, and I think they both do a particularly good job of gently guiding an inexperienced player through a new opening. . . . While Schiller probably deserves some of the criticism he gets, a consequence of writing too many books too quickly, he should also get credit when he does a good job."[2]

[edit] Linguistics career

Schiller has been heavily involved in the study of linguistics since 1982, when he returned to the University of Chicago. His dissertation on serial verbs, An Autolexical Account of Subordinating Serial Verb Constructions, earned him a Ph.D. in 1991. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Wayne State University.

His primary research focus has been Autolexical Linguistics, a framework for the description and explanation of natural language developed at the University of Chicago. Autolexical linguistics is a descendant of the Lexical functional grammar theory of Bresnan et al. His language concentration is in Southeast Asian languages, and in particular the Mon-Khmer Family including Khmer (Cambodian). In addition, he has a strong interest in pidgins and creole languages, especially the Hawaiian Pidgin.

In 1992 he became involved with computational linguistics, and worked at the Center for Information and Language Studies at the University of Chicago, under a DARPA grant, helping to build a parser based on autolexical theory. Prior to his work at the University of Chicago, he attended the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute on FLAS fellowships in 1987 (Northern Illinois University), 1988 and 1989 (University of Hawaii).

In 1990 he founded the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (with Martha Ratliff at Wayne State University). He has also been an officer of the Chicago Linguistics Society (1987).

Although he is no longer actively involved in academia, Schiller continues to lecture at many conferences and is developing language and linguistic software through Linguistics Unlimited. He can often be found at the conferences of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (February), Chicago Linguistic Society (April). and Southeast Asian Linguistics Society.

[edit] Books

Among Schiller's many books on chess are the following:

[edit] External links

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