Dr.Jeffrey Witzel
Presented to The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries on the occasion of Promotion to Associate Professor, Dr. Jeffrey Witzel, Linguistics & TESOL, Fall 2016.
Item(s) added to the Libraries' collection:
Sentence processing : psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett
Garrett, M., Cooper, W., & Walker, E. (1979). Sentence processing : psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett . Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.
This volume, published in 1979, was intended as a Festschrift for Merrill Garrett when he was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Festschrifts are usually published toward the end of an academic's career, often at retirement. This one fell a bit short of that date. After leaving MIT, Merrill went on to head the Cognitive Science program at the University of Arizona, where he was a distinguished teacher and researcher in linguistics and psychology until his "real" retirement, only a few short years ago -- some 30 years after the publication of this Festschrift. During that time, I had the great pleasure of working with Merrill as a PhD student in psycholinguistics, and I continue to be inspired by him and his remarkable contributions to the field.
Perhaps the most important chapter in this volume is a paper entitled "Levels of processing and the structure of the language processor", which was written by another of my PhD supervisors, Kenneth Forster. This paper essentially framed the debate about whether the language processor should be modeled as an interactive or modular cognitive system. It has helped to shape the way that I -- along with many other linguists and psychologists -- think about how language works.
It is truly a great honor to have my name associated with this volume and with these two giants in my area of study.