Charles J. Fillmore

Early years

Fillmore spent three years in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, where he intercepted coded Russian conversations on short-wave radio and taught himself Japanese. This principle has been a foundational insight for theories of syntax since that time.

Cognitive linguistics

By 1965, Fillmore had come to acknowledge that semantics plays a crucial role in grammar.

In 1968, he published his theory of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), which highlighted the fact that syntactic structure can be predicted by semantic participants. An action can have an agent, a patient, purposes, locations, and so on. These participants were called "cases" in his original paper, but later came to be known as semantic roles or thematic relations, which are similar to theta roles in generative grammar.

Following his move to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, this theory eventually evolved into a broader cognitive linguistic theory called Frame Semantics (1976). A commercial transaction, for instance, crucially involves elements such as a seller, a buyer, some good, and some money. In language, such an event can be expressed in a variety of different ways, e.g. using the verb 'to sell' or the verb 'to buy'. According to frame semantics, meaning is best studied in terms of the mental concepts and participants in the minds of the speaker and addressee.

Around the same time, Fillmore's Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, delivered in 1971 and published in 1975, contributed to establishing the field of linguistic pragmatics, which studies the relationship between linguistic form and the context of utterance.

In all of this research, he illuminated the fundamental importance of semantics, and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena. His collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff was generalized into the theory of Construction Grammar. This work aimed at developing a complete theory of grammar that would fully acknowledge the role of semantics right from the start, breaking with the dominant form-based approaches, while simultaneously adopting constraint-based formalisms as popular in computer science and natural language processing. This theory is built on the notion of construction from traditional and pedagogical grammars rather than the rule-based formalisms that dominate most of generative grammar. One of Fillmore's most widely noticed works of the time (with Paul Kay and Cathy O'Connor) appeared in Language in 1988 as "Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone". Their paper highlighted the merits of such a theory of by focusing on the 'let alone' construction. Over time, construction grammar developed into a research area of its own, and a number of variants have been proposed over the years by different researchers.

Fillmore is now widely recognized as one of the founders of cognitive linguistics. The first chapter of Cognitive Linguistics by Cruse and Croft (2004), for instance, begins with a summary of Fillmore's work. Fillmore served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1991 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000.

After 23 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Fillmore retired in 1994 and joined Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.