Sydney Lamb, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetSydney Lamb
Linguist, Native American languages, stratificational grammar, computational linguistics
Date of Birth: 04-May-1929
Place of Birth: Denver, Colorado, United States
Profession: linguist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About Sydney Lamb
- Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar.
- He has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding. Lamb earned his Ph.D.
- from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and taught there from 1956 to 1964.
- His dissertation was a grammar of the Uto-Aztecan language Mono, under the direction of Mary Haas and Murray B.
- Emeneau.
- In 1964, he began teaching at Yale University before joining the Semionics Associates in Berkeley, California in 1977.
- Lamb did research in North American Indian languages specifically in those geographically centered on California.
- His contributions have been wide-ranging, including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure.
- His work led to innovative designs of content-addressable memory hardware for microcomputers. Lamb is best known as the father of the relational network theory of language, which is also known as "stratificational theory".
- Near the turn of the millennium, he began developing the theory further and exploring its possible relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes.
- His early work developed the notion of "sememe" as a semantic object, analogous to the morpheme or phoneme in linguistics; it was one of the inspirations of Roger Schank's Conceptual dependency theory, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s/1970s. In 1999, his book — Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language expressing some of these ideas — was published. See also: "Linguistic and Cognitive Networks" in Cognition: A Multiple View (ed.
- Paul Garvin) New York: Spartan Books, 1970, pp.
- 195–222.
- Reprinted in Makkai and Lockwood, Readings in Stratificational Linguistics (1973), pp.
- 60–83.
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