Biography
Pieter
Albertus Maria Seuren
(born July 9, 1934 in Haarlem), a Dutch linguist, is emeritus professor of
Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen,
now a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen. After finishing the St. Ignatius Gymnasium, Amsterdam, in 1951, he
studied linguistics, together with classical languages and ancient history, at Amsterdam University from 1951 till 1958.
He then taught Classics at a Junior College in Amsterdam till 1963. For a brief
period he studied and worked under the guidance of the Amsterdam logician Evert Beth.
This was followed by an assistantship at Groningen University, after which, in
1967, he was appointed as a lecturer in Linguistics at (Darwin College, Cambridge), where he
stayed till 1970. In 1969 he obtained his PhD (‘’Operators and Nucleus’’) at
the University of Utrecht. From 1970 till 1974
he was lecturer in Linguistics at Oxford
University (Magdalen College). From there he moved to Radboud University in Nijmegen
as a professor of Philosophy of Language. In 1995 his chair was changed to
Theoretical Linguistics.
Since his retirement in 1999 he has
been a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen. In 1982 he founded the ‘’Journal of Semantics’’. In 1988 he was
elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Glasgow University. During his career he
fulfilled visiting professorships in Sydney,
Amsterdam,
Zürich,
Glasgow,
Oxford,
Penang,
Bern, Mannheim,
Maceió,
Porto Alegre,
Leipzig,
Vienna,
Stellenbosch,
Florianópolis.
His special fields of research are:
the theory of grammar and meaning and their interrelations (1969, 1975, 1996,
2009); the role of logic
(especially scope
phenomena) in language (1969, 1975, 1985, 2010); the theory of ‘’Semantic
Syntax’’ (1996); the analysis of the notion of meaning (1975, 2009); the theory
of semantic presupposition and the trivalent
logic required by it (1975, 1985, 2010); the analysis of the context-dependency
of sentences in discourse (1985, 2009, 2010); the development of a natural
logic on the basis of the natural meanings of logical operators in language
(2010).
Besides
his work in theoretical linguistics, Seuren is known as a historian of
linguistics (1998). From c. 1980 to c. 1995 he took an active interest in Creole
languages, in particular the English-based Surinam
Creole Sranan,
for which he devised a now legally sanctioned orthography, and the French-based
Creole of the Indian Ocean island Mauritius.
In this context, he co-founded, in 1980, together with Herman Wekker, the IBS
(‘’Institute for the Advancement of Surinamese Studies’’) and the still
flourishing Dutch-language periodical ‘’Oso’’ (Sranan for ‘house’).
His
seminal publications include:
- ‘’Operators and Nucleus. A Contribution to the Theory of Grammar’’. (diss. Univ. Utrecht) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.
- ‘’Discourse Semantics’’. Blackwell, Oxford, 1985.
- ‘’Semantic Syntax’’. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.
- ‘’Western Linguistics. An Historical Introduction’’. Blackwell, Oxford, 1998.
- ‘’A View of Language’’. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.
- ‘’Chomsky's Minimalism’’. Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, 2004.
- ‘’Language in Cognition’’. ‘’Language from Within’’ Vol. I) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.
- ‘’The Logic of Language’’. ‘’Language from Within’’ Vol. II) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
- ‘’From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language’’. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.
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