Famous People with Name Valin

Robert D. Van Valin            Origin/Culture/Country: Indian

Robert D. Van Valin: the principal writer behind Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics and discourse pragmatics, which is connected to other functional theories, like S. Dik's Functional Grammar, and also to the cognitive linguistics field pioneered by Ronald Langacker. His 1997 monograph Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a method for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages. Instead of positing a rich innate and universal syntactic structure (see Universal Grammar), Van Valin suggests that the only truly universal parts of a sentence are its nucleus, generally a predicating element such as a verb or adjective, and the arguments, normally noun phrases, that the nucleus requires. Van Valin also departs from Chomskyan syntactic theory by denying the universality of the verb phrase.

Jean-Baptiste-Henri De Valincour            Origin/Culture/Country: French

Jean-Baptiste-Henri De Valincour: was a French admiral and man of letters. He was a friend of chancellor d'Aguesseau, Racine (who he replaced at Académie française and as official historiographer to Louis XIV) and Boileau (Valincour was the dedicatee of Boileau's eleventh satire, "On true and false honour", and also completed the publication of Boileau's works in 1713).