John R. Ross
John R. "Haj" Ross | |
|---|---|
Ross in 2011 | |
| Born | May 7, 1938 Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | May 13, 2025 (aged 87) |
| Alma mater | MIT (PhD) University of Pennsylvania (AM) Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (linguistics courses) Freie Universität (general studies courses) Yale University (AB) |
| Known for | islands, pied piping, sluicing, "squib" |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Syntax, Generative grammar, Generative semantics, Poetics |
| Institutions | University of North Texas, MIT |
| Doctoral advisor | Noam Chomsky |
| Notable students | Richard S. Kayne |
John Robert "Haj" Ross (May 7, 1938 – May 13, 2025) was an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia. Until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.
Ross's 1967 MIT dissertation is a landmark in syntactic theory and documents in great detail Ross's discovery of syntactic islands. He is known for naming concepts. He coined many new terms describing syntactic phenomena, including copula switch, gapping, heavy NP shift, myopia, the penthouse principle, pied piping, scrambling, siamese sentences, sluicing, slifting, and sloppy identity. In linguistics more generally, Ross popularized the use of the term squib to refer to a short scholarly article.
Ross died on May 13, 2025.