Price Caldwell Linguistics Collection

Thomas Price Caldwell, known most commonly as Price, was born in Tutwiler, Mississippi and received his PhD from Tulane University.  Dr. Caldwell spent more than twenty years as a professor for the Mississippi State English department, teaching a range of courses that focused on everything from American poetry to creative writing (he even helped to establish the creative writing program here at Mississippi State).  He published works on literature and creative writing, but he also held an interest in linguistics, specifically in the intersection of linguistic semantics with semiotic theory and the philosophy of language.  He would continue to pursue this interest in linguistics throughout his life, continuously working on it in little bits and creating his own original approach of molecular sememics.  However, he never formally published any of his contributions, aiming to one day publish his views in one work.  After retiring from Mississippi State, Dr. Caldwell moved to Japan and worked as a professor of English at Meisei University in Tokyo for several years before retiring again, spending some time in Thailand and then returning permanently to Starkville.  After Dr. Caldwell was diagnosed with leukemia, he sent his linguistic work to his friend Robert J. Stainton at the University of Western Ontario who, along with a graduate student, began to work on a book that would make Caldwell's linguistic ideas available to a larger audience.  After Dr. Caldwell passed away in 2015, his wife, Alice Carol, established an endowment that brings visiting writers to speak at Mississippi State, the most recent of which is the fiction writer Monica Drake.  In 2018, Springer published Discourse, Structure and Linguistic Choice: The Theory and Applications of Molecular Sememics, the posthumous collection of Dr. Caldwell's linguistic papers worked on by Stainton and his graduate student, Oliver Cresswell, with a forward written by Peter Shilingsburg, former MSU professor and long time friend of Dr. Caldwell.  The publication of this book not only allowed Dr. Caldwell's dream of having all of his work published in a single volume to come to fruition, but it has also allowed a wider audience to come into contact with his unique contributions to the study of linguistics.