Memorial Resolution:
Charles A. Ferguson
(1921-1998)
Charles Albert Ferguson
was born in Philadelphia, PA. An early curiosity for
language, system, and order led him to explore foreign
languages through Oriental Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania (BA 1942, MA 1943 with a thesis on the
Moroccan Arabic Verb; PhD 1945 with a dissertation on
Standard Colloquial Bengali).
After graduating, he
joined the Foreign Service Institute and worked in the
Middle East from 1946-1955, where he established and
directed the Foreign Service Institute Area and Language
School attached to the American Embassy, Beirut. In the
early fifties he taught at Georgetown University's
Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Deccan College in
India, and Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern
Studies.
Ferguson's career, though
marked by a range of interests in language, was largely
characterized by a focus on applied linguistics. He left
teaching Arabic at Harvard in 1959 to found and direct
the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. He
led the Center in building close ties with international,
national, and regional needs related especially to
language teaching, literacy, and language planning. Many
lasting achievements mark his tenure at the Center:
development of TOEFL, a test of English language skills
used around the world and administered by the Educational
Testing Service; establishment of the Round Table on
Language for periodic discussion of problems faced by
individuals working across language barriers at
organizations such as the Foreign Service and World Bank;
cooperative agreements among U. S. universities to ensure
teaching of "special languages" (e.g.,
indigenous languages often needed by social scientists
and others doing work in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America); and the groundwork for establishing several
current clearing houses on information related to
language. After he left the Center in 1967 to establish
the Committee (later the Department) of Linguistics at
Stanford, he continued his involvement in applied
linguistics through helping to launch the National
Foreign Language Center and the Association of Teachers
of Arabic.
Ferguson made fundamental
pioneering contributions to several other fields,
including: language universals, first and second language
development, language use in society, and language
change. Several of his articles have for decades been
foundational classics in these fields and his activities
were fundamental in establishing Stanford as the leader
and in many instances the initiator in these areas.
In a now famous conference
held in 1961 at Dobbs Ferry he gave a path breaking paper
in which he detailed fifteen universals about nasal
vowels, including some generalizations about change. He
subsequently played a major role at Stanford in helping
to initiate the project on Language Universals, supported
by the National Research Council. This project published
twenty volumes of Working Papers in Language Universals.
Highlights were published in 1978 by Stanford University
Press in a four volume collection called Universals of
Human Language, of which he was one of the editors.
In an article in the first of these volumes he
characterized the revolutionary significance of the
development of research on universals of language, and
pointed out that a major change had occurred in the
orientation of the field of linguistics in the preceding
fifteen years or so due to this work. At the time when
the language universals movement appeared, an approach
which is generally called American structuralism ruled
the field in the United States. It was descriptive and
prided itself on the rigor of its method. However, it
refrained from any attempt to compare the structure of
languages as a whole and arrive at generalizations about
languages. It also strictly separated the study of
synchronic description from that of historical change or
considered the former to be fundamental. Work on
universals challenged both of these methodological and
theoretical constraints.
After coming to Stanford,
Ferguson was also instrumental in organizing the
Phonology Archive, a computer-based body of materials on
the sound structure of a large sample of the world's
languages. Equally path- breaking was his work on child
language acquisition which led to major research projects
such as the NSF-funded project "From Babbling to
Language".
A third field which
Ferguson helped establish in this country is the study of
language and society; here one of his fundamental
insights was that varieties of a language are often in
what he called a "diglossic" relationship:
speakers internalize the ability to use one variety in
formal settings such as lectures and official news casts,
another in informal settings such as radio talk shows.
Most current work on bidialectalism and bilingualism
finds its roots in this seminal article, published in
1959. He also studied the stylistic characteristics of
sports-caster talk, which was the initiative for work in
the field of discursive practices in different
situations.
He trained a large number
of linguists who themselves have gone on to be pioneers
in these sub-fields of linguistics. One of his greatest
legacies was enabling others to be willing to go against
the prevailing stream to push new ways of understanding
linguistic phenomena.
Despite all these
accomplishments, Charles Ferguson was a man of
extraordinary modesty. He was known for incredible
patience. Even in the roughest times he was always
gentle, reasoned, and serene, and had great faith in
people. Archbishop Ramsey once said: "Reason is an
action of the mind; knowledge is a possession of the
mind; but faith is an attitude of the person. It means
you are prepared to stake yourself on something being
so". He might well have been thinking of Charles
Ferguson, who was in every sense a man of reason, of
knowledge, and of faith. One of his lifelong passions was
the study of saints' lives, and language and religion.
He is survived by his
wife, Shirley Brice Heath, Professor of English and
Linguistics at Stanford, four children and eight
grandchildren.
COMMITTEE:
Elizabeth
Closs Traugott, Chair
Joseph H.
Greenberg
Shirley
Brice Heath
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