Sydney MacDonald Lamb (May 4, 1929- ), American linguist, professor at Rice University whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar.

Sydney Lamb has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding.

He did research in North American Indian languages specifically in those geographically centered around California. His contributions have been wide ranging including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure. His work led to innovative designs of associative memory hardware for microcomputers. He is best known as the father of the relational network theory of language, which is also known as 'stratificational theory'. Near the turn of the millennium, he has been developing the theory further and exploring its possible relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes. In 1999, he published a book, Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/pb.htm expressing some these ideas.

External link:

• Language and Brain: Neurocognitive Linguistics http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/
• Another bio of him http://www.fask.uni-mainz.de/lk/lk/britannica.html