A Fascinating Survey of American Linguistic Culture Through Past Centuries (1998)

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The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Whitney, the first U.S.-taught academic linguist, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869. Leonard Bloomfield (1878--1949), professor at the University of Chicago from 1921, founded the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Other linguists active in the first half of the 20th century include Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. From the 1950s, American linguistic tradition began to diverge from the de Saussurian structuralism taught in European academia, notably with Noam Chomsky's "nativist" transformational grammar and successor theories, which during the 1970s "Linguistics Wars" and the heyday of postmodernism gave rise to a bewildering variety of competing grammar frameworks. American linguistics outside the Chomskyan tradition includes functional grammar with proponents including Talmy Givón, and cognitive grammar advocated by Ronald Langacker and others. linguistic typology: controversially mass lexical comparison by Joseph Greenberg. Historical linguistics, especially Indo-European studies, is taught at Harvard, UCLA and Austin, Texas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_linguistics David K. Barnhart (born 1941) is an American lexicographer who specializes in new words. He began his career helping his father, Clarence Barnhart, edit the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary series. In 1980 he founded Lexik House Publishers. In the 1980s Lexik House published ТРОйКА--The TROIKA Introduction to Russian Letters and sounds (c. 1980) by Reason A. Goodwin, the Dictionary of Bahamian English (c. 1982) by John A. Holm with Alison Watt Shilling, and in 1987 The Dictionary of Gambling and Gaming by Thomas L. Clark. In 1982 he, with his father, began work on The Barnhart Dictionary Companion, a quarterly publication documenting appearance of new words, new meanings and new usages in English. This carries on the tradition of the Barnhart Dictionary of New English series (edited by his father, brother Robert Barnhart, and Sol Steinmetz), which was last published in 2001. He wrote Neo Words: A Dictionary of the Newest and Most Unusual Words of Our Time (1991). He created The Barnhart New-Words Concordance (1994) and its Supplement (2006), an index to the words contained in numerous new word dictionaries, which has been quarterly since 1994. With Allan A. Metcalf, he wrote America in So Many Words: Words that have shaped America (1997). He has worked as a teacher, lecturer, and as an expert witness reporting on usage and meaning in English words. He is a member and past president of the Dictionary Society of North America and the International Linguistic Association. He is a member of the American Dialect Society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Barnhart