Haj Ross
Haj (a.k.a. John Robert) Ross was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 7, 1938, in the Year of the Earth Tiger. He is Taurus, born with a Sun-Uranus conjunction, and with his Moon and Ascendant conjoined in Leo.
He attended the Poughkeepsie (New York) Day School, Philips Academy, Andover, then Yale University, where he majored in linguistics, graduating in June 1960. Following Yale, he was awarded a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD = German Academic Exchange Service), and went to Germany, for three semesters of graduate study, two in Bonn, and one in Berlin. Upon returning to the US, he was the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, with the help of which he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a Master’s degree in linguistics, writing a thesis, “A Partial Grammar of English Superlatives,” under the supervision of Zellig Harris, graduating in May 1964.
Following Penn, he attended MIT, where he was awarded a Ph. D. in linguistics in September 1967. His doctoral dissertation, “Constraints on Variables,” was supervised by Noam Chomsky.
From July 1966 to October 1985, he was a professor in the MIT Department of Linguistics. From April 1988 until April 1992, he was a Visiting Professor in the Departamento de Lingüística of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (in Belo Horizinte, Brasil). In 1992-1993, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. In 1993-1994, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of First Nation Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (in Prince George), and from 1994 to the present, he has been teaching at the University of North Texas (in Denton), first in the Department of English, and as of August, 2008, in the Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication.
He has also taught seminars and shorter courses in Japan, Germany, Sweden, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, as well as at various universities in the US.
He has done research in linguistics in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonology, and phonetic symbolism. In addition, for the past third of a century, he has been working interdisciplinarily, trying to establish a bridge linking poetics and linguistics. He is interested in creativity in general, and thus in developing more powerful methods of learning together, which he suspects will come through softening, and ultimately transcending, all supposed boundaries dividing philosophy, science, religion, and art. He is a peerless grade-inflator.
He is married to another linguist, Rosália Dutra, with whom he has a twenty-seven-year-old son, Nicholas Dutra Ross. He has a son, Daniel Erik, and a daughter, Aina Valeska, from his first marriage, to Elke-Edda Gerlach (who he met while he was studying in Berlin), and has been a grandfather, since June of 2009, of Stella Rose Deschenes, and since June of 2013, of Syrus Ross Deschenes, Valeska’s and Paul Deschenes’s daughter and son, respectively.
He regards a life unsurrounded by cats as as silly as one without music and art, which he plays, poorly, on his guitar, and paints, ditto, respectively, with artist markers.
As for a life in which he does not poke sentences, to make them worse, so that he can try to guess what makes them tick, and ditto to poor poems, he is sorry, but given his present equipment, he would be unable to come close to leading such a one.
Phone: 940 383 0224 (H)
Address: Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication
1155 Union Circle, # 305298
Denton, TX 76203-5017
He attended the Poughkeepsie (New York) Day School, Philips Academy, Andover, then Yale University, where he majored in linguistics, graduating in June 1960. Following Yale, he was awarded a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD = German Academic Exchange Service), and went to Germany, for three semesters of graduate study, two in Bonn, and one in Berlin. Upon returning to the US, he was the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, with the help of which he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a Master’s degree in linguistics, writing a thesis, “A Partial Grammar of English Superlatives,” under the supervision of Zellig Harris, graduating in May 1964.
Following Penn, he attended MIT, where he was awarded a Ph. D. in linguistics in September 1967. His doctoral dissertation, “Constraints on Variables,” was supervised by Noam Chomsky.
From July 1966 to October 1985, he was a professor in the MIT Department of Linguistics. From April 1988 until April 1992, he was a Visiting Professor in the Departamento de Lingüística of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (in Belo Horizinte, Brasil). In 1992-1993, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. In 1993-1994, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of First Nation Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (in Prince George), and from 1994 to the present, he has been teaching at the University of North Texas (in Denton), first in the Department of English, and as of August, 2008, in the Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication.
He has also taught seminars and shorter courses in Japan, Germany, Sweden, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, as well as at various universities in the US.
He has done research in linguistics in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonology, and phonetic symbolism. In addition, for the past third of a century, he has been working interdisciplinarily, trying to establish a bridge linking poetics and linguistics. He is interested in creativity in general, and thus in developing more powerful methods of learning together, which he suspects will come through softening, and ultimately transcending, all supposed boundaries dividing philosophy, science, religion, and art. He is a peerless grade-inflator.
He is married to another linguist, Rosália Dutra, with whom he has a twenty-seven-year-old son, Nicholas Dutra Ross. He has a son, Daniel Erik, and a daughter, Aina Valeska, from his first marriage, to Elke-Edda Gerlach (who he met while he was studying in Berlin), and has been a grandfather, since June of 2009, of Stella Rose Deschenes, and since June of 2013, of Syrus Ross Deschenes, Valeska’s and Paul Deschenes’s daughter and son, respectively.
He regards a life unsurrounded by cats as as silly as one without music and art, which he plays, poorly, on his guitar, and paints, ditto, respectively, with artist markers.
As for a life in which he does not poke sentences, to make them worse, so that he can try to guess what makes them tick, and ditto to poor poems, he is sorry, but given his present equipment, he would be unable to come close to leading such a one.
Phone: 940 383 0224 (H)
Address: Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication
1155 Union Circle, # 305298
Denton, TX 76203-5017
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Papers by Haj Ross
I am wise.
This means, if we are in search of wisdom ourselves, that we can never arrive at a place where we will “know” that we are wise, even if we are wise enough to know that we can never assert such a sentence.
What kind of search is this then? If you have wondered yourself, and are willing to hear some stumbling around, welcome aboard.
Confused discussion of wisdom and knowledge growing out of a need to say something TOO SOON at a conference on March 10, 1982, where the title of my talk is, foolishly, “Human linguistics.” Hello, help.
If you are seeking clear answers to any topic like this, do yourself a favor an steer clear of this mumbling.
But if you agree that it is very important to look for wisdom, in others, so that you can find a way to aspire to increasing it in yourself, then you are very welcome.
Learning can happen anywhere, be on your toes.
You will be the learner some times, and you will be the teachers sometimes, and there will be equality among you, and above all, LAUGHTER!
Old pond.
Frog jumps in
Sound of water
Learning is both our greatest talent and joy, and also our deepest calling.
We are one big family of colearners.
I am wise.
This means, if we are in search of wisdom ourselves, that we can never arrive at a place where we will “know” that we are wise, even if we are wise enough to know that we can never assert such a sentence.
What kind of search is this then? If you have wondered yourself, and are willing to hear some stumbling around, welcome aboard.
Confused discussion of wisdom and knowledge growing out of a need to say something TOO SOON at a conference on March 10, 1982, where the title of my talk is, foolishly, “Human linguistics.” Hello, help.
If you are seeking clear answers to any topic like this, do yourself a favor an steer clear of this mumbling.
But if you agree that it is very important to look for wisdom, in others, so that you can find a way to aspire to increasing it in yourself, then you are very welcome.
Learning can happen anywhere, be on your toes.
You will be the learner some times, and you will be the teachers sometimes, and there will be equality among you, and above all, LAUGHTER!
Old pond.
Frog jumps in
Sound of water
Learning is both our greatest talent and joy, and also our deepest calling.
We are one big family of colearners.
La femme – c’est beau.
The(fem) woman it-is beautiful (masculine form)
This short paper is about pronominal like French ce, which is guess one would have to translate as “it.”
This was a problem for me, and still is. It is one thing for my search for truth to be a kind of inner work, but it is another for me to insist that this identification must be shared by students who come to work with me. I wish I knew how to resolve this conflict in myself.
This was created “joint”lie, by George and Robin Lakoff, and Rich Carter, Rudy de Rijk, and various linguistics students in Cambridge aloud 1964-65..
Please to take it seriously unseriously.
So why not *last day? Because there is a special lexical item for last day - yesterday. And next day = tomorrow. What of next Christmas? <- the Christmas of the year that is after this year.
Etc. Have fun with these.
everything
less vast
than love –
let go of
I sensed love in each of the classes that made a strong impression on me. I think that there is not enough emphasis on the necessity, the centrality, of love, in all our lives, in all we think and feel. As Noam Chomsky said in an interview, when asked how it was that he was remarrying in his 80’s, he thought that a life without love was not worth living. That’s what I think too.
So as soon as you see this first line, you think: Stevens will put concept next to and inside or wrapped around, another concept. A deep look about how a poet holds their words together – a beauty of a study on coherence.