Charles Fillmore Biography

Charles Fillmore

Biography

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961.
Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. In 1963, his seminal article The position of embedding transformations in a Grammar introduced the transformational cycle, which has been a foundational insight for theories of syntax since that time. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976). In all of his research he has illuminated the fundamental importance of semantics and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena.
His earlier work, in collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff, was generalized into the theory of Construction Grammar. He has had many students, including Laura Michaels, Chris Johnson, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Len Talmy, and Eve Sweetser.
His current major project is called Frame Net; it is a wide-ranging on-line description of the English lexicon. In this project, words are described in terms of the Frames they evoke. Data is gathered from the British National Corpus, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by both lexical items and Frames. The project is influential -- Issue 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to it. It has also inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese.