LAMB, SYDNEY M(ACDONALD)

born May 4, 1929, Denver, Colo., U.S. American linguist and originator of stratificational grammar, an outgrowth of glossematics theory. (Glossematics theory is based on glossemes, the smallest meaningful units of a language.) Lamb obtained his Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the same institution from 1956 to 1964, directing the Machine Translation Project from 1958 to 1964. He began teaching at Yale University in 1964. In 1977 he joined the staff of Semionics Associates in Berkeley, Calif. Lamb's seminal work, Outline of Stratificational Grammar (1966), describes his theory of the four levels necessary for sentence analysis: the sememic, the lexemic, the morphemic, and the phonemic. These levels are hierarchically related, each realized by the elements in the level structurally beneath it.