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Joan BybeeAmerican linguist, professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Country:
 USA |
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Biography of Joan Bybee
Joan Bybee is an American linguist and professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and her Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1970. Her dissertation was on "Aspects of Natural Generative Phonology" and was completed in 1973. She has taught at New York University in Buffalo and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she became a professor in 1989 and served as the chair of the Linguistics department from 1998 to 2001. Bybee is also the Chair of the Linguistic Society of America since 2004.
Contributions to Linguistics
Bybee is one of the most influential representatives of the functionalist approach in theoretical linguistics, which opposes both the ideology of the "formal" approach (or Chomskyanism) and the ideology of structuralism. In her early works, she developed the so-called "Natural Phonology." In the mid-1980s, Bybee started focusing on theoretical morphology. Her book "Morphology" (1985) is a manifesto of functional morphology and argues for the existence of typological regularities that govern the placement of morphemes in word forms, affixation versus analytic expression of grammatical meanings, and more. Later, Bybee turned her attention to the problems of diachronic evolution of grammatical meanings. Her book "The Evolution of Grammar" (1994, co-authored) is a significant contribution to the theory of grammaticalization and the typological description of tense, aspect, and modality in languages. In her recent works, she outlines the contours of a new language model, in which the frequency of linguistic units and corpus-based mechanisms play a significant role. This model largely negates the structuralist opposition between "language" and "speech," as well as the ideologically similar Chomskyan opposition of "competence" and "performance."
Main Works
- Hooper, Joan B. 1976. An introduction to natural generative phonology. New York: Academic Press.
- Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bybee, Joan. 2006. Frequency of use and the organization of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
