Paul J. Chapin

Paul J. Chapin was an American linguist born December 27, 1938, and died July 1, 2015, who worked as an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1975 before directing the linguistics program at the National Science Foundation from 1975 to 1999, a tenure during which he supported research across competing theoretical schools rather than favoring one, funding any affordable proposal that showed promise. His own doctoral dissertation examined word derivation in English, and his subsequent research addressed psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, morphology, and language typology; he served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1977 and later as secretary treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America from 2008 to 2013. He received the National Science Foundation Director Superior Accomplishment Award in 2001 and the inaugural Victoria A. Fromkin Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession the same year, and was elected a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Psychological Science.