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. Professor Fillmore spent ten years at The Ohio State University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Year 1929 (MCMXXIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (UM, U of M or U-M) is a coeducational public research university in the state of Michigan. ... The Ohio State University (OSU) is a coeducational public research university in the state of Ohio. ...

He has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics; 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 Michaelis, Chris Johnson, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Len Talmy, and Eve Sweetser. For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the currently dominant school of linguistics that views the important essence of language as innately based in evolutionarily-developed and speciated faculties, and seeks explanations that advance or fit well into the current understandings of the human mind. ... Case Grammar is a theory of grammatical analysis, created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. ... Frame semantics is a theory that relates linguistic semantics to encyclopaedic knowledge developed by Charles J. Fillmore, and is a further development of his case grammar. ... For other uses, see Morphology. ... Paul Kay is a linguist. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... The term construction grammar (CxG) covers a family of theories, or models, of grammar that are based on the idea that the primary unit of grammar is the grammatical construction rather than the atomic syntactic unit and the rule that combines atomic units, and that the grammar of a language... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ... Leonard Talmy is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Buffalo in New York. ... Eve Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an important figure in the field of cognitive linguistics. ...

His current major project is called FrameNet; 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. 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... FrameNet is a project at Berkeley which produces an electronic resource describing semantic frames. ... The British National Corpus (or just BNC) is a 100-million-word collection of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. ...

His seminal publications include:

• "The Case for Case" (1968). In Bach and Harms (Ed.): Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1-88.
• "Frame semantics and the nature of language" (1976): . In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech. Volume 280: 20-32.
• "Frame semantics" (1982). In Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul, Hanshin Publishing Co., 111-137.
• (with Sue Atkins) "Starting where the dictionaries stop: The challenge for computational lexicography". (1994). In Atkins, B. T. S. and A. Zampolli (Eds.) Computational Approaches to the Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 349-393.
• Lectures on Deixis (1997). Stanford: CSLI Publications. (originally distributed as Fillmore (1975/1971) Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis by the Indiana University Linguistics Club)

External links

• Official website