Stephen R. Anderson

Stephen Robert Anderson was an American linguist born August 3, 1943, in Madison, Wisconsin, who died October 13, 2025. He held the Dorothy R. Diebold Professorship of Linguistics at Yale University, where he taught from 1994 until his 2017 retirement after earlier posts at Harvard, UCLA and Johns Hopkins, and he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2007. His work centered on morphology and the distinctiveness of human language, including the book A-Morphous Morphology (1992) and a 2004 book examining animal communication against human linguistic capacity, and he later published Phonology in the Twentieth Century (2021); he received the Linguistic Society of America Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award in 2014.