Steve Anderson left us on October 13. He was one of the most influential linguists of the last quarter of the 20th century, mainly in the domain of generative syntax, phonology and morphology. But he was also a pioneer for 21st century linguistics, connecting narrow and specific sub-domains of linguistics with general issues going far beyond the perimeter of a science of language, for example, evolutionary biology, language evolution and animal communication.
A student in mathematics and linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, Steve successfully defended his PhD thesis at MIT (1969).
A professor at prestigious American Universities – Harvard, UCLA, Stanford, Maryland, John Hopkins, and finally Yale – Steve had been an active scholar in many scientific institutions, including the Linguistic Society of America (Vice-President, President, Honorary Members Committee), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, CIPL (Vice-President and Member of the Executive Committee), the National Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Flemish Scientific Research Foundation, among others. He had been strongly connected with the University of Geneva, as President of the Scientific Committee and Member of the Local Organization Committee of the 19th International Congress of Linguists (July 2013) and as the external reviewer of the interdisciplinary network Language and Communication (2015-2019).
Steve was not only a great scholar and a living library in science and linguistics, he was also a faithful and trustful colleague. Without his permanent supervision of the 19th ICL, the congress could not have been as successful as it was. But above all, Steve was a linguist concerned with crucial issues in linguistics, such as endangered languages and minority languages. Having received Swiss nationality after his marriage with Janine Anderson-Bays, Steve was passionate about Romansh, a Swiss national language spoken by a minority of people in the Swiss Alps. He recently followed an online class on Romansh and sent to some of his friends a short text written in Romansh about the fictitious annexation of Switzerland.
Steve was a man to be a friend of: he had a very fine sense of humour; he was also a “bon vivant”, in other words, a colleague one could not fail to see again during his stays in Europe. We all will miss Steve. But we also have to be grateful for his many and exceptional contributions to the field of linguistics.
Our thoughts and condolences go to Janine and Steve’s family.
Jacques Moeschler
Books by Steve Anderson
- Anderson S. R. (2021). Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Second edition, revised and expanded, Language Science Press.
- Anderson S. R. and L. de Saussure (eds) (2018). René de Saussure and the Theory of Word Formation. Language Science Press.
- Anderson S. R., J. Moeschler and F. Reboul (eds) (2013). The Language-Cognition Interface. Librairie Droz.
- Anderson S. R. (2012). Languages: A very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
- Anderson S. R. (2005). Aspect of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford University Press.
- Anderson S. R. (2004). Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion. Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language. Yale University Press.
- Anderson S. R. and D. W. Lightfoot (2002). The Language Organ. Cambridge University Press.
- Anderson S. R. (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge University Press.
- Anderson S.R. (1974). The Organization of Phonology. Academic Press.
- Anderson S. R. and P. Kiparsky (eds) (1973). A Festschrift for Morris Halle. Rinehart & Wilson.
