Zwicky was born on September 6, 1940, in Allentown, Pennsylvania.[3] He received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Princeton University (1962). He was a student of Morris Halle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in 1965.
He coined the term "recency illusion", the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction or phrase is of recent origin when it is in fact of long-established usage.[4] For example, the figurative use of the intensifier "literally" is often perceived to have recent origin, but in fact it dates back several centuries.[5] The phenomenon is thought to be caused by selective attention.
At the Linguistic Society of America's 1999 Summer Institute (held at UIUC) he was the Edward Sapir professor, the most prestigious chair of this organization, of which he is a past president.[6]
He is one of the editors of Handbook of Morphology, among other published works. He is also well known as a frequent contributor to the linguistics blog Language Log, as well as his own personal blog that largely focuses on linguistics issues.[7]
— (1971). "In a Manner of Speaking". Linguistic Inquiry. 2 (2): 223–233.
— (1972). "Note on a Phonological Hierarchy in English". In Stockwell, Robert S.; Macaulay, Ronald K. S. (eds.). Linguistic change and generative theory. pp. 275–301.
— (1974). "Hey, whatsyourname". Chicago Linguistic Society. 10.
— (1977). "On Clitics". Indiana University Linguistics Club.
—; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1986). "Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict". Language: 751–773.
—; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1987). "Plain morphology and expressive morphology". Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 13: 330–340. doi:10.3765/bls.v13i0.1817.
—; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1988). "The syntax-phonology interface". In Newmeyer, Frederick J. (ed.). Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Vol. 1. pp. 255–280.
—; Sadock, Jerrold M. (1975). "Ambiguity tests and how to fail them". Syntax and Semantics. 4: 1–36.
—; Sadock, Jerrold M. (1985). "Speech Act Distinctions in Syntax". Language Typology and Syntactic Description. 1: 155–196.
—; Spencer, Andrew, eds. (2001). The Handbook of Morphology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
^"About AMZ". Arnold Zwicky's Blog. 2022-09-15. Retrieved 2024-06-01.
^Intensive and Quotative ALL: something old, something new, John R. Rickford, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky, Isabelle Buchstaller, American Speech 2007 82(1):3-31; Duke University Press (what Arnold Zwicky (2005) has dubbed the "recency illusion," whereby people think that linguistic features they’ve only recently noticed are in fact new).
