Hypothesis A, Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter

Anyone who has studied linguistics in the last half-century has been affected by thework of David Perlmutter. One of the era's most versatile linguists, he is perhaps best known as thefounder (with Paul Postal) of Relational Grammar, but he has also made contributions to areasranging from theoretical morphology to sign language phonology. Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B (the titleevokes Perlmutter's characteristic style of linguistic argumentation) offers twenty-three essays byPerlmutter's colleagues and former students. Many of the contributions deal with the study of theworld's languages (including Indo-European languages, sign language, and languages of the Americas),reflecting the influence of Perlmutter's cross-linguistic research and meticulous analysis ofempirical data. Other topics include grammatical relations and their mapping; unaccusatives,impersonals, and the like; complex verbs, complex clauses, and Wh-constructions; and the nature ofsign language. Perlmutter, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego,and still actively engaged in the field, opens the volume with the illuminating and entertainingessay, "My Path in Linguistics."ContributorsJudith Aissen, Mark Aronoff, Leonard H. Babby,Nicoleta Bateman, J. Albert Bickford, Sandra Chung, William D. Davies, Stanley Dubinsky, KatarzynaDziwirek, Patrick Farrell, Donald G. Frantz, Donna B. Gerdts, Alice C. Harris, Brian D. Joseph,Geraldine Legendre, Philip S. LeSourd, Joan Maling, Stephen A. Marlett, Diane Lillo-Martin, JamesMcCloskey, Richard P. Meier, Irit Meir, John C. Moore, Carol A. Padden, Maria Polinsky, Eduardo P.Raposo, Richard A. Rhodes, Wendy Sandler, Paul Smolensky, Annie Zaenen

Maria Polinsky is a Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University.