Robert E. Longacre

Robert E. Longacre (August 13, 1922–April 20, 2014) was an American linguist and missionary who worked on the Triqui language and a text-based theory and method of discourse analysis. He is well known for his seminal studies of discourse structure (text linguistics), but he also made significant contributions in other linguistic areas, especially the historical linguistics of Mixtec, Trique, and other related languages. His PhD was at the University of Pennsylvania under Zellig Harris and Henry Hoenigswald. His 1955 dissertation on Proto-Mixtecan was the first extensive linguistic reconstruction in Mesoamerican languages. This was one of several SIL studies which helped to establish the Oto-Manguean language family as being comparable in time depth to Proto-Indo-European. His research on Trique was the first documented case of a language with five distinct levels of tone.
He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he taught Linguistics for over 20 years (1972-1993), mostly on topics related to his approach to discourse analysis. In 1994-1995, he served as President of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) and was honored by LACUS in 2007.
He was academically sharp and active till the end, working on a new book that came out just after his death:
Born in Akron, Ohio on August 13, 1922, he attended Houghton College in upper New York State where he met his wife, Gwen. After graduating in 1943 they married in 1946 and went to Mexico in 1947 where they lived with the Trique peoples in the mountains of Oaxaca State.