Peter Hugoe Matthews

Peter Hugoe Matthews was a British linguist and historian of linguistics. He was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985.
Matthews is perhaps best known for his writings on linguistic morphology. He published two monographs on the subject.
Matthews was an early follower of Noam Chomsky, but lost enthusiasm for the "generative enterprise" during the 1960s. He described the Chomskyan revolution as "the Best Thing that has happened to linguistics in the past 2500 years". But he also wrote that dominance of various Chomskyan ideas is not "a Good Thing, and I would not be disappointed if my study of their origins were to lead more scholars to question them".
Peter Hugoe Matthews died on 7 April 2023, at the age of 89.

Selected publications

Inflectional Morphology: A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Morphology: An introduction to the theory of word-structure Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence Syntax Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky A Short History of Structural Linguistics Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press, Oxford The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics Oxford University Press, Oxford Syntactic Relations: A Critical Survey The Positions of Adjectives in English Oxford University Press, Oxford What Graeco-Roman Grammar was About Oxford University Press, Oxford