LINGUIST List 31.1375
Fri Apr 17 2020
All: Philip Carr (1953-2020)
Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinsonlinguistlist.org>
Date: 17-Apr-2020
From: Patrick Honeybone <patrick.honeybone
ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Philip Carr (1953-2020)
E-mail this message to a friend 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
Page Updated: 17-Apr-2020