Paul Newman received his B.A. (Philosophy) and M.A. (Anthropology) from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. (Linguistics) from UCLA. His dissertation was a grammar of Tera, a previously undescribed Chadic language, based on fieldwork carried out in northern Nigeria. He also has a law degree (J.D., summa cum laude from Indiana University) and is a member of the Indiana Bar. He has held academic positions at Yale University, Abdullahi Bayero College (now Bayero University) in Kano, Nigeria, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the University of Michigan, where he was the Senior Copyright Specialist for the university, and Indiana University, where he served for six years as Chair of department. At Indiana, he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor of Law affiliated with the Center on Law, Society, and Culture. He was the founding editor of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, on which he still serves as consulting editor, and has been on the editorial board of Language, Current Anthropology, Studies in African Linguistics, and Anthropological Linguistics. For some fifteen years he was the Chadic Bibliographer for the Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists. His numerous honors include the following: Distinguished Professor, Indiana University; Honorary Member, African Language Project, University of Maryland Eastern Shore; Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Linguistic Typology, Australian National University; Plenary Speaker, Second International Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig; Visiting Research Professor, Indiana–Hamburg Exchange Program; Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; Personal Chair in African Linguistics, University of Leiden, awarded by Juliana, Queen of the Netherlands. In the area of service (both within and outside of academia) he has been a member of the Endangered Languages Committee and the Social and Political Concerns Committee of the LSA, and functions as Special Counsel to the Society. He was a member of the State Board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana and is now vice-president of the Bloomington chapter. He is a life member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He has published eighteen books (written or edited) and over a hundred articles, book reviews, and ethnomusicological works. The following is a selected list: Modern Hausa-English Dictionary [with Roxana Ma Newman] (1977); Nominal and Verbal Plurality in Chadic (1990); On Being Right: Greenberg’s African Linguistic Classification and the Methodological Principles which Underlie It (1995); The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar (2000); Linguistic Fieldwork [with Martha Ratliff] (2001); Chadic and Hausa Linguistics: Selected Papers of Paul Newman, with Commentaries, ed. by Philip J. Jaggar and H. Ekkehard Wolff (2002); Klingenheben’s Law in Hausa (2004); A Hausa–English Dictionary (2007).
“Comparative Chadic: phonology and lexicon” [with Roxana Ma],
Journal of African Languages 5:218–251 (1966); “Ideophones
from a syntactic point of view,” Journal of West African
Languages 5:107–117 (1968); “Music from the villages of
Northeastern Nigeria,” [with E. H. Davidson et al.] Asch Records
(1971); “Syllable weight as a phonological variable,” Studies
in African Linguistics 3:301–323 (1972); “Chadic
classification and reconstructions,” Afroasiatic Linguistics
5:1–42 (1977); “Syllable weight and tone,” Linguistic
Inquiry 12:670–673 (1981); “An interview with Joseph
Greenberg,” Current Anthropology 32:453–467 (1991);
“Fieldwork and field methods in linguistics,” California
Linguistic Notes 23(2):1–8 (1992); “Hausa tonology:
complexities in an ‘easy’ tone language,” in The Handbook of
Phonological Theory, ed. by John Goldsmith, pp. 762–781 (1995);
“Are ideophones really as weird and extra-systematic as linguists
make them out to be?” in Ideophones, ed. by F. K. E. Voeltz
and C. Killian-Hatz, pp. 251–258 (2001); “The endangered
languages issue as a hopeless cause,” in Language Death and
Language Maintenance, ed. by Mark Janse and Sijmen Tol, pp. 1–13
(2003); “Comparative Chadic revisited,” in West African
Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Russell G. Schuh, ed. by Paul
Newman and Larry M. Hyman, pp. 188–202 (2006); “Copyright essentials for linguists,” Language Documentation & Conservation 1:28–43 |
