31.1375, All: Philip Carr (1953-2020)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1375. Fri Apr 17 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1375, All:  Philip Carr (1953-2020)

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Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 19:55:47
From: Patrick Honeybone [patrick.honeybone at ed.ac.uk]
Subject: Philip Carr (1953-2020)

 
It is with extreme sadness that we have learned that Philip Carr has passed
away. Phil was born in Scotland in 1953. He obtained a 1st class honours
degree in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1981, completing a PhD
there on the philosophy of linguistics in 1987. After tutoring at Edinburgh
(1981-83) and a visiting lectureship at the University of Khartoum, he joined
the Department of English Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne in 1983, as a temporary lecturer, lecturer (1985-95) and
senior lecturer (1995-1999). This was a productive part of his career. A
revised version of his PhD was published ('Linguistic Realities: an Autonomous
Metatheory for the Generative Enterprise', 1990, CUP) in which he opposed
instrumentalism and adopted a realist philosophy of linguistics, starting from
Popper’s falsificationist view of science. Throughout his career, Phil
remained fascinated by the status of linguistic objects (especially
phonological constructs) in terms of the philosophy of mind and of science.
During a long period, in collaboration with Noel Burton-Roberts, he defended a
particular interpretation of Chomskyan Universal Grammar: the
‘representational conjecture’. The best exposition is in a famous volume that
Phil coedited: 'Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues'
(2000, OUP). 

However, Phil did not content himself with a ‘meta’ approach. He did phonology
in several frameworks, working on Scottish and Tyneside English, French,
Spanish and Akan, writing on the lexical-post lexical divide, strict cyclicity
and derived environments, tongue root harmony, nasalisation and schwa. He
published an advanced textbook ('Phonology', 1993, Macmillan; 2nd edn. 2013
with Jean-Pierre Montreuil). His 'English Phonetics and Phonology: an
Introduction' (Blackwell, 1999; 3rd edn. 2020) was very popular, bearing
witness to his abilities ranging from debates on the most technical issues to
the pedagogical presentation of complex ideas. 

In the late 1990s, his career took a major turn. Phil had always loved the
south of France, its food and wines. He defended a Habilitation à diriger des
recherches in 1997 at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and was soon
appointed as Professor in the English Department of the University Paul Valéry
in Montpellier, where he stayed from 1999 to his retirement in 2017. There he
became interested in bilingual child language acquisition, tracking the
French/English progress of his two younger children over ten years. In 2003,
he colaunched a project on varieties of English called ‘Phonologie de
l’anglais contemporain: usages, variétés et structure’, involving over 30
researchers and students and leading to 'La prononciation de l’anglais
contemporain dans le monde: variation et structure' (Brulard, Carr, Durand,
eds, 2015, Presses Universitaire du Midi). He also wrote on sociolinguistic
issues, including work on the speech of Scottish politicians.  

All this led him to modify his stance on the idea of an innately endowed UG
and he became involved in the Distributed Language Group, an international
network of linguists, social psychologists and philosophers with an interest
in distributed cognition. 

Phil was director of the Centre d’Etudes de Linguistique Anglaise at
Montpellier, organized workshops and conferences, and was a regular speaker
himself. He was a formidable debater, presenting his ideas with wit and verve,
and could stand up to the best whatever their reputation in the field. He was
well-known at the Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm), which he coorganised for
many years. The response on the mfm email list has been emotional, eliciting
many tributes.

On retirement, Phil moved back to Scotland. He died in Edinburgh on 30th March
2020 after a short battle with cancer. He is survived by three children and
two grandchildren.

Jacques Durand (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
Heinz Giegerich, Patrick Honeybone (University of Edinburgh)
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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