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David M. Perlmutter
David Michael Perlmutter (born 28 October 1938) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.
Perlmutter is best known as co-founder, with Paul Postal, of relational grammar, a syntactic framework that treats grammatical relations such as subject and object as primitive notions rather than as derivatives of phrase structure.
Perlmutter received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 under the supervision of Noam Chomsky; his dissertation was titled Deep and surface constraints in syntax. He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, in 1977.
His Ph.D. dissertation was later published as a book: Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax (1971).
With Paul Postal, Perlmutter developed relational grammar (RG), a framework that treats grammatical relations (such as subject, direct object, and indirect object) as core theoretical constructs rather than as configurations derived from phrase structure. The approach was developed and presented in early form in RG lectures at the 1974 LSA Summer Linguistic Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Perlmutter edited Studies in Relational Grammar 1 (1983) and co-edited (with Carol Rosen) Studies in Relational Grammar 2 (1984), which developed and applied RG analyses across a wide range of languages.
Perlmutter's paper "Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis", presented at the 1978 Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting, is often cited as an early published statement of the Unaccusative Hypothesis. In the paper's acknowledgements, Perlmutter states that the hypothesis itself was developed in joint work with Paul Postal. A footnote credits Geoffrey Pullum with the terms unaccusative and unergative.
The hypothesis distinguishes two subclasses of intransitive verbs: unaccusative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying direct object) and unergative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying subject). It has been applied to phenomena including impersonal passives, auxiliary selection, and participial constructions across typologically diverse languages. The distinction was later incorporated into multiple syntactic frameworks, including work in Government and Binding and Lexical Functional Grammar, and has been extensively discussed at the interface of syntax and lexical semantics.
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David M. Perlmutter
David Michael Perlmutter (born 28 October 1938) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.
Perlmutter is best known as co-founder, with Paul Postal, of relational grammar, a syntactic framework that treats grammatical relations such as subject and object as primitive notions rather than as derivatives of phrase structure.
Perlmutter received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 under the supervision of Noam Chomsky; his dissertation was titled Deep and surface constraints in syntax. He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, in 1977.
His Ph.D. dissertation was later published as a book: Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax (1971).
With Paul Postal, Perlmutter developed relational grammar (RG), a framework that treats grammatical relations (such as subject, direct object, and indirect object) as core theoretical constructs rather than as configurations derived from phrase structure. The approach was developed and presented in early form in RG lectures at the 1974 LSA Summer Linguistic Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Perlmutter edited Studies in Relational Grammar 1 (1983) and co-edited (with Carol Rosen) Studies in Relational Grammar 2 (1984), which developed and applied RG analyses across a wide range of languages.
Perlmutter's paper "Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis", presented at the 1978 Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting, is often cited as an early published statement of the Unaccusative Hypothesis. In the paper's acknowledgements, Perlmutter states that the hypothesis itself was developed in joint work with Paul Postal. A footnote credits Geoffrey Pullum with the terms unaccusative and unergative.
The hypothesis distinguishes two subclasses of intransitive verbs: unaccusative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying direct object) and unergative verbs (whose single argument patterns like an underlying subject). It has been applied to phenomena including impersonal passives, auxiliary selection, and participial constructions across typologically diverse languages. The distinction was later incorporated into multiple syntactic frameworks, including work in Government and Binding and Lexical Functional Grammar, and has been extensively discussed at the interface of syntax and lexical semantics.