science

Marianne Mithun

Marianne Mithun is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Marianne Mithun rather than just read about it. In short: Marianne Mithun ( mih-THOON; born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.

Key takeaways

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Reproduce the core statement of Marianne Mithun from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Marianne Mithun ( mih-THOON; born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.

Career She began her career with extensive fieldwork on Iroquoian languages, especially Mohawk, Cayuga, and Tuscarora, earning her PhD in Linguistics from Yale in 1974 with a dissertation entitled "A Grammar of Tuscarora" (Floyd Lounsbury, dissertation supervisor). Her work spans a number of linguistic subfields, including morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, language contact and change, typology, language documentation, and the interrelations among these subfields. She has worked on a wide variety of languages from a wide variety of language families, but specializes in Native American languages. Besides Iroquoian languages, she has also worked in California on Central Pomo and the Chumashan languages, on Central Alaskan Yup'ik, and on the Austronesian language Kapampangan. Mithun compiled a comprehensive overview of Native American languages in The Languages of Native North America. A review on the Linguist List describes the work as "an excellent book to have as a reference" and as containing "an incredible amount of information and illustrative data." The work is a bipartite reference organized firstly by grammatical categories (including categories that are particularly widespread in North America, such as polysynthesis), and secondly by family. Mithun and her husband, linguist Wallace Chafe, 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.

Awards and honors Mithun was the founding president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology from 1983 to 1985. From 1999 to 2003 she was president of the Association for Linguistic Typology. From 2014 to 2015 she was president of The Societas Linguistica Europaea. She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2002 The Languages of Native North America won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, awarded annually by the Linguistic Society of America for the best book in linguistics. In 2008, Mithun was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2019, Mithun served as the vice president/president-elect of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and in 2020 she served as the 95th President of the LSA. In 2021, she was awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the British Academy "for her research into Native American and Austronesian languages which represent a significant contribution to theoretical linguistics". Mithun has taught at many institutions around the world, including Georgetown, La Trobe, Rice, Stanford, SUNY Albany, Amsterdam, Cagliari, Berkeley, Hamburg, UIUC, UNM, Wake Forest, and Yale.

Selected works — (1984). "The evolution of noun incorporation". Language. 60 (4): 847–894. doi:10.1353/lan.1984.0038. S2CID 143600392. — (1991). "Active/Agentive case marking and its motivations". Language. 67 (3): 510–546. doi:10.1353/lan.1991.0015. S2CID 144965886. — (1999). The languages of native North America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7. — (2001). "Who shapes the record: The speaker and the linguist". In Newman, Paul; Ratliff, Martha (eds.). Linguistic Fieldwork: Essays on the Practice of Empirical Linguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 34–54.

References

External links "UCSB Linguistics Marianne Mithun". Retrieved 2023-10-30. "Society for Linguistic Anthropology Records". American Philosophical Society. Archived from the original on 2008-05-11. Retrieved 2008-07-17.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Marianne Mithun

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Marianne Mithun claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Marianne Mithun before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Marianne Mithun ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Marianne Mithun

In research: Marianne Mithun appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Marianne Mithun in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Marianne Mithun is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1946 births, 20th-century American linguists, 21st-century American linguists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Marianne Mithun outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Marianne Mithun in 20 minutes

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Frequently asked questions

What is Marianne Mithun in simple terms?

Why does Marianne Mithun matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Marianne Mithun?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Marianne Mithun.