Ray C. Dougherty

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Ray C. Dougherty is an American linguist who taught on the New York University Arts and Sciences faculty until his retirement in 2014. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1968. While at MIT, he was among the first students of Noam Chomsky and worked in transformational grammar. During the Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic of the generative semantics movement. He specialized in computational linguistics and has published several books and articles on the subject. In later years, Dougherty has explored biolinguistics, focusing on the cochlea’s role in the evolution of animal communication and the naturalistic applications of information theory. He has also contributed to advancing the study of semiotics at NYU.