Sydney Lamb, a native of Denver, Colorado, graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Economics and earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation was a description of a California Indian language.
     He taught linguistics first at the University of California, Berkeley, then at Yale University. At the University of California he directed the Machine Translation Project under grants from the National Science Foundation, and at Yale University he was Director of the Linguistic Automation Project, also supported by the National Science Foundation. He has also taught at summer Linguistic Institutes at the University of Michigan, UCLA, and SUNY/Buffalo. He spent the year 1973-74 as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, with a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
     In 1977 he left Yale to devote full time to the development of a new type of computer memory whose invention was inspired by the relational network theory of language he had been developing. After selling his invention to another company, he went to Rice University in 1981 as Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics. He was later appointed Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.
     His earlier research and publications were in the areas of North American Indian languages, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, theory of linguistic structure, and the design of associative memory hardware for microcomputers. He is known as the father of the relational network theory of language, also known as 'stratificational theory'. In recent years he has been developing the theory further and exploring its relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes. This work is described in his book, Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, published in 1999 by the John Benjamins Publishing Company (Amsterdam and Philadelphia) and in Chapters 12 through 18 of his more recent book "Language and Reality", published in 2004 by Continuum Books. (See also the web page on Neurocognitive Linguistics.) Benjamins has also published an autobiographical sketch.