John J. McCarthy Appointed Distinguished Professor by UMass Board of Trustees
Sept. 25, 2007
| Contact: | Daniel J. Fitzgibbons 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. – John J. McCarthy, professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been appointed a Distinguished Professor by UMass President Jack Wilson. The appointment was made following its approval by the University’s Board of Trustees at its Sept. 19 meeting at UMass Lowell.
McCarthy was recommended for the honor by former Chancellor John V. Lombardi and Charlena Seymour, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, who said he has “clearly established himself as a world-renowned leader in the field of phonology.”
A member of the UMass Amherst linguistics department since 1985, McCarthy has played an instrumental role in the formation of optimality theory and was one of two key developers of the highly influential theory of prosodic morphology. The goal of McCarthy’s research is to discover the universal principles that govern the sound structure of human languages. A particular focus is the idea that the differences between languages are the result of assigning different priorities to conflicting constraints.
He is the author six books with a seventh work in press and another under contract. He has also co-edited five books and published 31 peer-reviewed articles in international journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Phonology and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. His research has been supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Two years ago, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was one of the original 12 recipients of the UMass Amherst Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. In 2004, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal as a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. He has also been awarded fellowships by the NSF and the Guggenheim Foundation.
McCarthy, who headed the linguistics department from 1993-96, taught previously at the University of Texas in Austin from 1979-85. He was also a consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1984-86, and an instructor at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institutes at Stanford University in 1987, the University of California Santa Cruz in 1991 and Cornell University in 1997.
McCarthy earned his bachelor’s degree in linguistics and Near East languages from Harvard College in 1975 and a doctorate in linguistics and philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.
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