David M. Perlmutter

David M. Perlmutter is an American linguist born October 28, 1938, in New York City, and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, who earned an AB from Harvard and a PhD from MIT in 1968 under Noam Chomsky. He co-founded relational grammar with Paul Postal, a framework treating grammatical relations such as subject, direct object, and indirect object as core theoretical constructs rather than derivatives of phrase structure, and he developed the Unaccusative Hypothesis distinguishing classes of intransitive verbs by their underlying argument patterns; he also contributed to the phonology of sign languages, including the syllable structure of American Sign Language. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2000, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.