Emmon Bach

Emmon Bach was an American linguist born June 12, 1929, in Kumamoto, Japan, and died November 28, 2014, in Oxford, England, who became professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and also held a professorial research associate post at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His work spanned syntax, phonology, semantics, and morphology, and he wrote influential textbooks including An Introduction to Transformational Grammars in 1964 and Syntactic Theory in 1974, while also conducting fieldwork on polysynthetic languages, notably the Haisla language of British Columbia. He was elected president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1996 and a fellow of the society in 2006, and after his death the society established the Emmon Bach Fellowship Fund to support student participation in collaborative language research.