Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. (Chuck) Fillmore, 67th president of the Linguistic Society of America, died on February 13, 2014, at his home in San Francisco, California. Fillmore was one of the world’s preeminent linguists. His career spanned more than half a century, during which he contributed a reliably constant stream of original and influential ideas in many areas of linguistic research.¹

Fillmore was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1929. According to him, his first exposure to the field of linguistics came at age fifteen, when a missionary neighbor gave him a copy of Eugene Nida’s Linguistic interludes (1944), introducing him to a set of understandings about language that were in stark contrast to beliefs held by most nonlinguists, for example, that ‘relevant linguistic generalizations are based on speech, not writing’. This early experience motivated him to study linguistics at the University of Minnesota, where, as a college student, he supported his studies by wrapping venetian blinds at Montgomery Wards. As a student he participated in the building of a concordance of some Late Latin texts, an effort that required several generations of students, working with index cards and typewriters. During that time he attended two LSA Summer Institutes. One, held in 1951 at the University of California, Berkeley, he spent studying with Mary Haas, Franklin Edgerton, and Harry Hoijer and learning about Thai, Sanskrit, and Navajo. As an undergraduate, he taught English to post-war Eastern European immigrants and became familiar with Slavic and Baltic languages.

After college, faced with the draft, Fillmore took the US Army Russian Language Proficiency Test, and although he did not speak the language, having taken just one year of Russian, he passed at the ‘high fluent’ level. He was sent to Kyoto, Japan, to monitor encoded Russian transmissions on a shortwave radio. In his spare time he studied Japanese and became interested in the comparative syntax of English and Japanese, using his own system of representing sentence structure, as syntax had not been part of his studies in college. After serving his term, Fillmore received the first Army local discharge to Japan and stayed on, teaching English and studying the structure of Japanese at Kyoto University.

In 1957, Fillmore began his graduate studies in linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a time when structuralist efforts to formulate discovery procedures were at the forefront of scientific research on language. He worked on phonetics, phonology, and syntax as an advisee of Kenneth Pike, was exposed to Charles Fries’s work on discovering grammatical categories through their distributional properties, and also worked part-time on a Russian-English machine translation project with Andreas Koutsoudas.

By his own account, Fillmore was among the first in Ann Arbor to read Chomsky’s Syntactic structures in 1957 and ‘became an instant convert, [giving up] all ideas of procedural linguistics’ (Fillmore 2012:707). After receiving his Ph.D. in 1962, he took a job at the new linguistics department at The Ohio State University in Columbus, where he taught for the next ten years. In 1963, he published a paper on embedding rules in a transformational grammar (Fillmore 1963). The paper introduced the notion of cyclic application of grammatical rules: apply all rules to the smallest applicable unit, then apply them to the smallest unit containing that one, and so on. This principle is still active in grammatical theory. During this time he worked within the generative framework embodied in Chomsky’s Aspects—‘faithfully … and eagerly’, in his own words—yet continued to explore divergent approaches such as Tesnière’s 1959 precursor to dependency grammar.

As Fillmore recounts this period, he was engaged in a project to create a single, coherent, transformational grammar of English when he encountered a problem with the notation used to represent the valence of predicates. Symbols such as P(a), P(a,b), and P(a,b,c) could be used to represent many of the important facts about intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive predicates across categories, and about the properties of their subjects and objects, but failed to capture important generalizations about classes of arguments...