Bruce Nevin

Bruce Nevin is a linguist who has been working closely with the Pit River tribe in northeastern California since 1970. His linguistic database of the Achumawi language is the tribal resource for language revitalization. He earned his degrees in linguistics from The University of Pennsylvania (AB '68, AM '70, PhD '98) with a dissertation on the phonology of the language. He has also written extensively about the theory of language and information developed by Zellig Harris, and edited two volumes of reports from researchers continuing and extending that work (The Legacy of Zellig Harris, John Benjamins 2002). Since 1991 he has worked to integrate this linguistics into a cognitive science founded on mathematical principles of negative-feedback control systems, the essential feature that distinguishes living from non-living things, and is past President and current Treasurer of the International Association for Perceptual Control Theory (IAPCT). He lives in his ancestral home on Martha's Vineyard Island, in Massachusetts.