Arnold Zwicky

Arnold Melchior Zwicky is an American linguist born September 6, 1940, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who holds positions as adjunct professor at Stanford University and distinguished university professor emeritus at Ohio State University. His work spans phonology, including research on half rhymes, morphology through realizational morphology and rules of referral, and syntax through work on clitics and construction grammar, and he established the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax. He coined the term recency illusion, the belief that a word, meaning or construction is of recent origin when it is actually long established, illustrated by the intensifier literally; he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and was named 2008 GLBT Scientist of the Year.