John R. Ross

John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist.

He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal.

Ross met Lakoff in 1963 and began collaborating with him especially on work by and influenced by Postal.

He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.

He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia.

Until Spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas and his class offerings there included Linguistics and Literature, Syntax, Field Methods, History of English, Semantics and Pragmatics; he also oversaw U.N.T.'s Doctorate in Poetics program.

Relating to syntactic islands, he also coined the terms "left-branch condition", "complex-np constraint", "coordinate structure constraint", and "sentential subject constraint".

In phonology, he suggested the term conspiracy to Charles Kisseberth.

Like Roman Jakobson, Ross analyzes poetry using linguistics (see poetics).

Ross's 1967 MIT dissertation is a landmark in syntactic theory and documents in great detail Ross's discovery of syntactic islands.

Ross is known for his onomastic fecundity; he has coined many new terms describing syntactic phenomena, including copula switch, gapping, heavy NP shift, myopia, the penthouse principle, pied piping, scrambling, siamese sentences, sluicing, slifting, and sloppy identity.

In linguistics more generally, Ross popularized the use of the term squib to refer to a short scholarly article.

As a student, Ross was exposed to many influential figures within the field.

Ross was a student of Bernard Bloch, Samuel Martin and Rulon Wells at Yale University; Zellig Harris, Henry Hiz, Henry Hoenigswald and Franklin Southworth at the University of Pennsylvania; and Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, Paul Postal, Edward Klima and Hu Matthews at MIT.