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Alexis Manaster Ramer

American linguist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ4721492
Source-derived summary

Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956) is a Polish-born American linguist (PhD 1981, University of Chicago).

Work

Ramer has published extensively on syntactic typology (esp. in relation to Australian, Eskimo, and Austronesian languages); on phonological theory and its relation to phenomena such as versification and speech errors; on comparative linguistics and etymology (Indo-European, Uto-Aztecan, Yiddish), on glottochronology and genetic classification of languages (Nostratic, Altaic, Haida-Nadene, Pakawan/Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa-Nadene); on poetics (Vedic, Homeric, medieval Yiddish); and on the history of linguistics.

Manaster Ramer is the founder of the ACL special interest group on Mathematical linguistics (SIGMOL) and the organizer of the first Mathematics of Language conference.

He is honored by a festschrift edited by Fabrice Cavoto, The Linguist's Linguist: A Collection of Papers in Honour of Alexis Manaster Ramer, Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2002.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Alexis Manaster Ramer” is american linguist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Alexis, Manaster and Ramer, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1956, 1981, 2002—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1956-01-01. For this dossier, Alexis, Manaster and Ramer is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

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The phrase “american linguist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4721492. VIAF identifies the subject as 39430789. The Library of Congress control number is n86007548. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1981 and 2002.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Alexis Manaster Ramer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.