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      April 14, 1999
      
     
James McCawley, 61; Linguist Sparked Rift Among Colleagues

      By MARGALIT FOX
      
     Dr. James D. McCawley, an internationally renowned linguist who
     sought wherever possible to combine in his work his three consuming
     passions -- language, music and ethnic food -- died April 10 after
     collapsing on the campus of the University of Chicago, where he had
     taught for more than three decades. He was 61 and lived in Chicago.
     
     The apparent cause was a heart attack, said university officials.
     
     McCawley helped instigate the first big ideological rift in modern
     linguistics. Until 1957 the field had been defined by Chomskyan
     generative grammar, a theory that focuses almost exclusively on
     syntax, or the rules of sentence formation. In the late 1960s,
     McCawley and several young colleagues developed a new theory called
     generative semantics, which held that the study of grammar must
     necessarily involve the study of logic and meaning as well.
     Originally conceived as an extension of Noam Chomsky's work,
     generative semantics was regarded by many hard-line Chomskyan
     linguists, including Chomsky himself, as a theoretical slap in the
     face.
     
     In addition to writing scores of technical publications, McCawley,
     the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics
     and East Asian Languages, was the author of "The Eater's Guide to
     Chinese Characters" (1984), which helped Western diners avoid the
     embarrassing necessity, as Calvin Trillin once wrote, of carrying a
     wallet card in Chinese that read, "Please bring me some of what
     that man at the next table is having."
     
     McCawley was a rumpled bear of a man, with a bristling black
     mustache and chin-length dark hair; his sartorial style ran to
     corduroy jackets with threads sprouting from the hems. His speech
     was a deeply idiosyncratic amalgam of Scotland, where he was born,
     and Chicago, where he grew up, further complicated by a residual
     trace of the stammer that had plagued him when he was young.
     
     He possessed a rigorous yet playful intellect, a prodigious memory
     and a host of artistic talents, colleagues recalled. "In my entire
     30 years of association with him, I rarely told him anything he
     didn't know," said linguist Jerrold Sadock, also of the University
     of Chicago. "He had thought about everything and he knew
     everything."
     
     McCawley might think, on any given day, about East Indian writing
     systems, Japanese phonology, Korean gastronomy, Spanish soap
     operas, microtonal music, mathematics, logic and libertarianism.
     Name any city in the world and he would direct you to the best
     Chinese restaurant there. He was a first-rate Chinese cook -- his
     pigs' ears in garlic sauce remains etched in colleagues' memories
     -- and an enthusiastic host. He sang, played the piano,
     harpsichord, guitar and clarinet and composed a bit. He spoke
     Spanish, French, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Russian, Mandarin Chinese,
     Hungarian, Japanese, Swedish and Portuguese.
     
     He was preternaturally unphysical and did not know how to drive a
     car.
     
     "There are tie-ins between linguistics and virtually everything,"
     McCawley said in an interview last year. "It's an excuse for me to
     be a perpetual student."
     
     James David McCawley was born in Glasgow on March 30, 1938,
     immigrating with his family to Chicago when he was 7. He studied
     mathematics, "for no particularly good reason," as he later
     recalled, earning a master's degree (and a de facto bachelor's)
     from the University of Chicago in 1958. Having always enjoyed
     foreign languages, he found his way into the first doctoral class
     of the newly formed linguistics department at the Massachusetts
     Institute of Technology, where his teachers included Chomsky. He
     received his Ph.D. in 1965.
     
     McCawley, who had joined the faculty of the University of Chicago
     the previous year, was famous for his parties, which included
     annual celebrations of Bastille Day (guests had to bring a dish
     from a country liberated from French domination; you could cheat
     and bring a six-pack of Stroh's, brewed in Detroit), and a
     celebration of Hongul Day, which commemorated the creation of the
     Korean alphabet.
     
     McCawley's generosity also took more intimate forms. The linguist
     John Goldsmith, a Chicago colleague, recalled: "He was singing
     Yiddish folk songs with a student from Uruguay, who said all her
     Yiddish folk song books had been confiscated by the police. The
     next day she found two Yiddish folk song books in her mailbox."
     
     McCawley's marriage to linguist Noriko Akatsuka ended in divorce;
     he is survived by his sisters, Caroline Podvin, of Monee, Ill., and
     Monica Cox, of Culver, Ind.
     
     Among his honors were the presidency of the Linguistic Society of
     America in 1996 and election to the American Academy of Arts and
     Sciences in 1983. His books included "Adverbs, Vowels and Other
     Objects of Wonder" (1979), "Everything That Linguists Have Always
     Wanted to Know About Logic (but Were Ashamed to Ask)" (1981) and
     "Thirty Million Theories of Grammar" (1982).
     
     "Languages are weird and wonderful things," McCawley said last
     year. "As long as you are perceptive enough there is plenty to keep
     you happy and busy."