Robert Van Valin, Jr.

Robert D. Van Valin, Jr (born February 1, 1952) is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book (with Randy J. LaPolla) Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.

Instead of positing a rich innate and universal syntactic structure (see Universal Grammar), Van Valin suggests that the only truly universal parts of a sentence are its nucleus, housing a predicating element such as a verb or adjective, and the core of the clause, containing the arguments, normally noun phrases, or adpositional phrases, that the predicate in the nucleus requires. Van Valin also departs from Chomskyan syntactic theory by not allowing abstract underlying forms or transformational rules and derivations.

Van Valin received a BA in Linguistics from UC San Diego (1973) and a PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley (1977). He has taught at the University of Arizona, Temple University, UC Davis, and the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, where he served as department chair for 15 years. He is currently on leave from Buffalo and is Professor of General Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been a visiting researcher at the Australian National University and at the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He has been awarded a NSF Graduate Fellowship, a Research Award for Outstanding Scholars from Outside of Germany from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2006) and a Max Planck Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (2008–13). He has been an Assistant Editor for Language (1991–93) and has served on the LSA Program Committee (1994–96), chairing the committee in 1996 and taught at the LSA Summer Institutes at UC Berkeley in 2009 and at University of Colorado in 2011.

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