Wallace Chafe


Wallace Chafe was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus and research professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara.

Biography

Chafe was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1958. From 1975 to 1986 he was the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became professor emeritus at UCSB in 1991.
Chafe was a cognitivist; he considered semantics to be a basic component of language. He was a critic of Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics.
He was an influential scholar in indigenous languages of the Americas, notably Iroquoian and Caddoan languages, in discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, and also prosody of speech.
Together with Johanna Nichols, he edited a seminal volume on evidentiality in language in 1986.
While at UC Santa Barbara, he and his wife, linguist Marianne Mithun, established and directed The Wallace Chafe and Marianne Mithun Fund for Research on Understudied Languages. The fund provides support for graduate students to cover expenses associated with language documentation projects for understudied languages.

Works