Greenberg, Joseph
GREENBERG, JOSEPH
GREENBERG, JOSEPH (1915–2001), U.S. anthropologist and linguist. Born on 28 May 1915, Joseph Greenberg was a gifted young pianist who had considered becoming a classical performer. He instead entered the academic world, graduating from Columbia University in 1936 and then earning his doctorate from Northwestern University in 1940. During World War ii he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and Intelligence Corps. After the war he taught at the University of Minnesota, then at Columbia from 1948 to 1962. He was a professor of anthropology at Stanford University from 1962 to 1985; he served as chair of the Anthropology Department from 1971 to 1974, and from 1964 to 1981 also chaired the Committee on African Studies.
Greenberg's linguistic studies, which were concerned with both the structure of language and the similarities between languages, earned him an international reputation. His Language Universals with Special References to Feature Hierarchies (1966) established certain universal principles of language structure and attracted significant attention. His notion of the "implicational universal" influenced the work of many scholars in his field. His work on language families, however, sparked controversy. The Languages of Africa (1963), in which Greenberg determined that there were four basic groups of African languages, was considered speculative, though its premise was later accepted by many scholars. A similar theory presented in Language in the Americas (1987) found many in disagreement. Some critics took issue with Greenberg's data and methodology and dismissed this area of his research, though some contend that later discoveries of genetic similarities support Greenberg's groupings. In his last research, which he pursued until his death in 2001, Greenberg sought to prove links among what he called the "Eurasiatic" languages, claiming that most of the languages of Europe and Asia had commonalities.
Greenberg was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He served as president of the African Studies Association in 1964 and 1965, as president of the West African Linguistic Society from 1955 to 1970, and as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1976. He was the recipient of many awards, including the Haile Selassie Prize for African Research in 1967 and the Talcott Parsons Prize for Social Science from the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977.
[Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)]