David E. Johnson

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David E. Johnson (born December 21, 1946 in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American linguist.

He is best known for his work on relational grammar, especially the development with Paul Postal in 1977 of arc pair grammar (Johnson and Postal, 1980). For a brief history of early work on relational grammar, see Newmeyer, 1980. In contrast to the generative-enumerative (proof-theoretic) approach to syntax assumed by transformational grammar, arc pair grammar took a model-theoretic approach. In arc pair grammar, linguistic laws and language-specific rules of grammar were formalized in the same manner, namely, as logical statements in an axiomatic theory. Further, sentences of a language, understood as structures of a certain type, were the models of the set of linguistic laws and language-specific statements, thereby reducing the notion of grammaticality to the logical notion of model-theoretic satisfaction. For a more detailed history of model-theoretic approaches in linguistics, see Pullum and Scholtz, 2005.

In the late 90s, he and Shalom Lappin published the first detailed critiques of Chomsky's minimalist program (Johnson and Lappin 1997, 1999). This work was followed by a lively debate with proponents of minimalism on the scientific status of the program (cf. Lappin, Levine and Johnson 2000a,b; 2001 and responses).

[edit] Sources

Johnson, David E. (1974/1979). Toward a Theory of Relationally-based Grammar. Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series, ed. Jorge Hankamer. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Johnson, David E. and Paul M. Postal (1980). Arc Pair Grammar. Princeton: PUP.
Johnson, David E. and Shalom Lappin (1997). "A Critique of the Minimalist Program". Linguistics and Philosophy 20, 273-333.
Johnson, David E. and Shalom Lappin (1999). Local Constraints vs Economy. Stanford: CSLI.
Lappin, Shalom, Robert Levine and David E. Johnson (2000a). "The Structure of Unscientific Revolutions." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 665-771.
Lappin, Shalom, Robert Levine and David E. Johnson (2000b). "The Revolution Confused: A Reply to our Critics." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 873-890.
Lappin, Shalom, Robert Levine and David E. Johnson (2001). "The Revolution Maximally Confused." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19, 901-919.
Newmeyer, Frederick (1980). Linguistics in America. New York: Academic Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz. (2005). "Contrasting applications of logic in natural language syntactic description." In Petr Hájek, Luis Valdés-Villanueva, and Dag Westerståhl (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress, 481-503.