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Sarah Thomason | |
|---|---|
_Thomason.jpg) Thomason in July 2012 | |
| Born | 1939 (age 85–86) |
| Mother | Marion Griswold Grey |
| Awards | Wilbur Cross Medal |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Noun suffixation in Serbo-Croatian dialects (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alexander Schenker |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguist |
| Institutions | |
| Website | www-personal |
Sarah "Sally" Thomason (née Grey; born 1939) is an American scholar oflinguistics,Bernard Bloch distinguishedprofessor emerita at the University of Michigan.[1] She is best known for her work onlanguage contact,historical linguistics,pidgins andcreoles,Slavic Linguistics,Native American languages andtypological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguisticpseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as theSkeptical Inquirer,The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal andAmerican Speech, in regard to claims ofxenoglossy.[2]
Sarah Thomason received aB.A. in German fromStanford University in 1961.[2] While studying this B.A., she had the opportunity to study a course in linguistics. This course eventually led her to do her application for graduation work in linguistics, when she was nominated for theWoodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation program. She later turned down this fellowship. After spending a year in Germany mastering the language, she was re-awarded the Fellowship and was admitted intoYale University, where she completed both anM.A. in 1965 and aPh.D. in 1968 in linguistics.[2][3] She taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971, before moving to theUniversity of Pittsburgh in 1972.[2] She was named theWilliam J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at theUniversity of Michigan in 1999, and received the highest honor granted by the University of Michigan to its faculty by being named theBernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics in 2016. She was also Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2010 to 2013.[4]
Thomason was interested in learning how to dofieldwork on theIndo-European languages. She decided that Indo-European languages fromEastern Europe would be best suited for research asWestern European languages had been already thoroughly studied and the literature was vast. She traveled to the formerYugoslavia and started preparing her project onSerbo-Croatian, with the intention of focusing her career onSlavic studies. Thomason spent a year in this region writing her dissertation project on noun suffixation inSerbo-Croatian dialectology. Thomason did not, however, continue focusing on either Slavic or on Indo-European languages.[3] Instead, Thomason's career focus shifted in 1974, when she encountered literature aboutpidgins andcreoles. She realized thatlanguage contact was crucial for an understanding oflanguage change. Since then, the vast majority of Thomason's work focuses on language contact phenomena.[3]
Thomason is also known for her contributions to the study ofNative American languages. Thomason's interest in these languages started with her studies onpidgin languages, specifically pidgin Delaware, derived fromDelaware languages, andChinook jargon. She later became interested inSalishan languages, a field that she has been studying for over thirty years. She has spent every summer since 1980 studyingMontana Salish, also known as the Salish-Pend d'Oreille language, talking with its last fluent speakers fordocumentation, as well as creating a dictionary and materials for the Salish and Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee language program.[2][3][5]
Thomason has argued that language change could be a product of deliberate action driven by its speakers, who may consciously create dramatic changes in their usage, if strong motivation is present.[3] This view challenges the current assumption in historical linguistics that, on one hand, deliberate language change can only produce minor changes to a language, and, on the other, that an individual on his or her own is not able to produce language change. While she admits that the permanence of the change is dependent on social and linguistic probability, she emphasizes these factors do not invalidate the possibility of permanent change occurring. Thomason argues that under a situation of language contact bilingual speakers can adapt loanwords to their language structure, and that speakers are also capable of rejecting changes to the structure of their language. Both of these cases show conscious and deliberate actions from the part of the speakers to change their language.[6]
Thomason has also criticized alleged cases ofxenoglossy from a professional point of view as a linguist. Her articlePast tongues remembered? has been reprinted in different publications and translated intoFrench andGerman.[7] Thomason has examined, among others, the cases presented by authorIan Stevenson. In Stevenson's worksXenoglossy: A Review and Report of A Case, andUnlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy, he presents the case studies of subjects who claimed to remember having livedpast lives and to be able to speak in a foreign language when they were underhypnosis. In Stevenson's opinion, their ability to speak a foreign language without having been exposed to it could be proof ofreincarnation. Thomason, however, analyzed those cases and concluded that the subjects did not show real knowledge of the foreign language they said they were able to speak. Thomason pointed out that the performance of the individuals was by far not to the standards of that of anative speaker, as they showed very limited vocabulary and poor grammar in the foreign language. Thomason also noticed that the speech produced was many times limited to a repetition of some phrases or short answers, and it sometimes included words in a different language than the one subjects claimed to be able to speak. Thomason argues that the structure of the experiment allowed for the subjects to be able to guess the meaning of some of the questions by the hypnotists. She concludes that none of the individuals studied by Stevenson could prove xenoglossy, and that their knowledge of the foreign language could be explained by a combination of natural means such as exposure to the language, use ofcognates, and guesses, amongst other resources.[8]
She is one of theLanguage Log bloggers.[9]
Thomason has been a regular contributor toacademic journals and publications specializing in the field oflinguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences.[7]
From 1988 to 1994, she was the editor ofLanguage, the journal of theLinguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1999, she was the Collitz Professor at the LSA summer institute. In 2006, she was elected aFellow of the LSA,[10] and, in 2009, she served asPresident of the LSA.[11] In 2000, she was President of theSociety for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.[2] She was also Chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, and Secretary of the section from 2001 to 2005.[2]
She is currently an associate editor for theJournal of Historical Linguistics,[12] as well as part of the advisory board of theJournal of Language Contact.[13]
| This section of abiography of a living persondoes notinclude anyreferences or sources. Please help by addingreliable sources. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourcedmust be removed immediately. Find sources: "Sarah Thomason" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(June 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
She is married to the philosopher and computer scientistRichmond Thomason and is the mother of the linguistLucy Thomason. Her mother was the ichthyologistMarion Griswold Grey.
