Linguistic Encounters: A Scholar's Journey

Abstract

I sketch my zigzag path from premed biology major (1955) to PhD in linguistics (1969) to professor of linguistics at UCLA (1974–). This history may seem quaint in days of fieldwork by storyboards and Zoom. I describe encounters with language which pinballed me into linguistics: 1960–1962 as a student in Paris and summers as an interpreter with the US Department of State. Then mathematical logic (linguistics plus precision) at the University of Pennsylvania with John Corcoran; a year-plus in a peasant village in Madagascar; then 1970–1974 in England, as a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Then I land permanently at UCLA, with many working stays in Holland, Germany, and Israel.