January 9, 2003

Rodman’s Published Term Enters Oxford English Dictionary

Dr. Rodman (Photo: Herman Lankford)

The Oxford English Dictionary recently honored Dr. Robert D. Rodman, professor of computer science at NC State University, by giving him the first citation in the definition of a new entry called “Montague grammar.”

According to the dictionary entry, Montague grammar is “a linguistic theory which maintains that a grammar is built up from individual syntactic units, each of which has a corresponding semantic unit.” The dictionary adds that the term also is “a description of the grammar of a language in terms of this theory.” Rodman published the first occurrence of the term in “Papers in Montague Grammar” in 1972.

Rodman joined the College of Engineering in 1978. Author of books on linguistics, voice recognition and computer speech technology, his research interests include computer speaker identification and automatic lip synchronization of spontaneously spoken speech. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1961, his master’s in mathematics in 1965, his master’s in linguistics in 1971 and his doctorate in linguistics in 1973, all from the University of California at Los Angeles.

— mcblief —

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