Charles J. Fillmore
| Charles J. Fillmore | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 9, 1929 St. Paul, Minnesota |
| Died | February 13, 2014 (aged 84) San Francisco |
| Fields | Linguistics |
| Institutions | Ohio State University, |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota (B.A, Linguistics);University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1961) |
| Notable students | Laura Michaelis, Len Talmy, Eve Sweetser |
| Known for | Cognitive linguistics, case grammar, frame semantics, FrameNet |
| Notable awards | 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Spouse | Lily Wong Fillmore |
|
Website Official website |
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Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at The Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.
A three–day conference was held at UC Berkeley in celebration of his 80th birthday in 2009. Fillmore received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He died in 2014.
Fillmore spent three years in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, where he intercepted coded Russian conversations on short-wave radio and taught himself Japanese. Following his discharge, he taught English at a Buddhist girls' school while also taking classes at Kyoto University.
He returned to the US, receiving his doctorate at the University of Michigan and then teaching at The Ohio State University in Columbus. At the time, he was still a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. In 1963, his seminal article The position of embedding transformations in a Grammar introduced the transformational cycle. The central idea is to first apply rules to the smallest applicable unit, then to the smallest unit containing that one, and so on. This principle has been a foundational insight for theories of syntax since that time.
By 1965, Fillmore had come to acknowledge that semantics plays a crucial role in grammar.
In 1968, he published his theory of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), which highlighted the fact that syntactic structure can be predicted by semantic participants. An action can have an agent, a patient, purposes, locations, and so on. These participants were called "cases" in his original paper, but later came to be known as semantic roles or thematic relations, which are similar to theta roles in generative grammar.
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