Julian+C.+Boyd

Julian C. Boyd (Photo courtesy the Boyd familty) || //__ Julian C. Boyd __// (December 25, 1931 – April 5, 2005) – an American linguist who made a great contribution in modality of English language and also is well-known for his pedagogical excellence at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent almost 30 years of his academic career.
 * [[image:http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/04/images/boyd_julian.jpg width="175" height="195" caption="Julian Boyd"]]

//__ Biographical tips __//__. __
 * He was born Orlando and raised in Bogalusa, a small town on Louisiana's Gulf Coast;
 * He began his undergraduate education at Georgetown University, after two years of study he transferred to Williams College where he earned a B.A. in English in 1952;
 * Then in 1954 he earned a M.A. in English from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1965;
 * He joined the Department of English at Berkeley in 1964 as an assistant professor.

//__ The great professor and the big-name linguist. __//

He was hired by the English department as a linguist at the height of intense interest in the study of linguistics, when linguistics served as the model that was supposed to give the humanities a “scientific” basis. Students and faculty from Europe, England and the United States became excited at the possibilities of linguistics, and Professor Boyd responded to that excitement with his own brand of passionate interest in the topic and in his students. Although he was referred to as a linguist, he preferred to be called a “philosophical grammarian.”

// His important essays include: // He also coauthored the 12-volume Roberts English Series, for grades 3-9, adopted by schools throughout the nation and edited collections such as Speech Act Theory: Ten Years Later and Meaning.
 * “**The Semantics of Modal Verbs**,” (coauthored with J. P. Thorne);
 * “**Shall and Will**” (coauthored with Zelda Boyd);
 * “**The Act in Question**.”

Boyd developed an expertise in the day-to-day use of English and the modal auxiliary "helping" verbs that are used with main verbs to express shades of time and mood, in the belief that ordinary language use embodies some of the deepest problems philosophers have dealt with in their traditions. He was a scholar of sentences that used modal operators such as “necessarily” or “possibly” or that were qualified by modals such as “can,” “may,” “might,” “will,” “shall,” “would,” “should,” “must,” or “ought to.”

Professor Boyd’s students came out of his classes confident in their ability to make the proper distinctions between the use of “shall” and “will.” One aspect of modal logic was once pronounced by a Cambridge University philosopher as the hardest problem in all of philosophy. Professor Boyd’s desire was fixated on that hard knot. He had a classic philosophical passion to get at the truth of things, especially the truth of the meaning of words and sentences. He was called upon to provide expert testimony and research about the meaning of words in roughly 40 court cases, including murder trials, and he wrote numerous articles about language and meaning.

He taught thousands of students on campus before, and after, retiring in 1994, and many of his inspired students went on to achieve major careers in the academy on their own. Students recognized and valued his passionate engagement with the issues and with his students as well as the rigorous thinking he demanded of them.

In 1993 when Boyd was awarded UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, he wrote that he took seriously the idea that teachers are role models for their students. "I try to present myself to them as someone who enjoys doing what he's doing, who loves learning, who loves teaching, who is compassionate, and who listens," he wrote.

// This professor emeritus of English was a member of: //
 * Modern Language Association
 * American Philosophical Association
 * the Linguistic Society of America
 * Berkeley Linguistic Society
 * Philological Association of the Pacific Coast
 * Semiotic Society of America and the Semiotic Circle.