Best Linguist

William Labov is an American linguist whose 1966 New York City study helped establish variationist sociolinguistics.

Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and Prague School figure noted for phonology, distinctive features, and his 1960 model of language functions.

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose posthumous 1916 Course in General Linguistics helped found structuralism and modern semiotics.

H. Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language known for the cooperative principle and conversational implicature, introduced in 1975.

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist whose 1933 book Language became a central text of American structural linguistics.

Morris Halle was a Latvian-born American linguist at MIT, coauthor with Noam Chomsky of The Sound Pattern of English in 1968.

Peter Ladefoged was a British phonetician at UCLA, known for field phonetics and the 1975 book A Course in Phonetics.

John L. Austin was a British philosopher of language whose 1962 book How to Do Things with Words founded modern speech act theory.

Franz Bopp was a German philologist whose 1816 work comparing Sanskrit with European languages helped found comparative Indo-European grammar.

Ken Hale was an American MIT linguist who studied endangered Indigenous languages and proposed non-configurational analyses of Warlpiri in the 1980s.

Barbara Partee is an American linguist and philosopher, known for bringing Montague grammar into linguistics and shaping modern formal semantics.

Paul Kiparsky is a Finnish-born linguist at Stanford, notable for major work in phonology, morphology, and lexical phonology.

Michael Halliday was a British linguist who developed systemic functional linguistics, treating grammar as a social semiotic from the 1960s.

Angelika Kratzer is a German semanticist, known for influential work on modality, conditionals, and possible-world semantics from the 1980s onward.

Charles J. Fillmore was an American linguist who proposed case grammar in 1968 and later founded frame semantics and FrameNet.

Christopher D. Manning is an Australian computational linguist at Stanford, known for statistical NLP and the Stanford CoreNLP toolkit.

Richard Montague was an American logician and philosopher, notable for Montague grammar, which applied formal logic to natural language semantics.

Karl Brugmann was a German Neogrammarian whose comparative Indo-European grammar work helped formalize regular sound-law methods.

Zellig Harris was an American linguist whose 1952 work on discourse analysis and transformation methods influenced early generative grammar.

Irene Heim is a German-born semanticist at MIT, known for File Change Semantics, introduced in her 1982 dissertation on definiteness.

Joseph Greenberg was an American linguist known for language typology and for his 1963 classification of African languages.

Bernhard Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist (1889-1978) whose 1957 Grammata Serica Recensa became a major reference for Old and Middle Chinese.

Michael Silverstein was an American linguistic anthropologist at the University of Chicago, notable for theories of metapragmatics and indexical order.

John Gumperz was an American sociolinguist whose work on code-switching and interactional sociolinguistics shaped the field from the 1960s.

Antoine Meillet was a French linguist and Indo-Europeanist noted for linking language change to social history in early 20th-century scholarship.

Bernard Comrie is a British linguist and typologist, author of Aspect in 1976 and Language Universals and Linguistic Typology in 1981.

Joan Bresnan is an American linguist and Stanford professor emerita, known with Ronald Kaplan for creating Lexical Functional Grammar in the 1970s.

R. M. W. Dixon is an Australian linguist known for grammars of Australian languages, especially Dyirbal, and Basic Linguistic Theory.

Emile Benveniste was a French linguist noted for Indo-European studies and for analyses of pronouns and enunciation in general linguistics.