Skip to main content

Royal Skousen papers on Brigham Young University career, 1967-2014

 Sub-Series — Multiple Containers
Identifier: MSS 8255 Series 1 Sub-Series 2 Sub-Series 4 Sub-Series 2

Scope and Contents

Contains career advancement and academic department files, course material files, and student mentoring files accumulated before and while Skousen was employed as an associate/assistant/full professor of English and linguistics at Brigham Young University (1979-present). This includes employment contracts and promotions, memos, committee materials, awards, departmental changes and correspondence, leave arrangements, scholar visits, copyright issues, new technology, annotated periodicals, course materials (in English, English Language, Linguistics, etc.), including notable student papers and master's theses (for most of which Skousen was on the approving committee or something similar), and even a student-professor collaboration. Materials dated 1967-2014.

Dates

  • 1967-2014

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is available for research with permission from the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Prospective users must request access in writing. The donor agreement requires that Special Collections seek permission from the Skousens until 2045 or their demise; thereafter, Special Collections will solely make decisions regarding access.

Conditions Governing Use

It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain any necessary copyright clearances. Permission to use material from this collection must be obtained from Reference Services at specialcollections@byu.edu.

Biographical / Historical

From the Collection:

Royal Jon Skousen, son of LeRoy Bentley Skousen and Helen Louise McCarty, was born on August 5, 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, the oldest of ten children. He graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon. When he was 19, his father unexpectedly died of lung cancer. Royal went on to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Finland from 1965 to 1967. After his return in 1968, he married Sirkku Unelma Härkönen; they moved to Orem, Utah and raised seven children together. Meanwhile, Royal received further education in the form of a BA from BYU in English and math. He earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972, then worked as an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas-Austin until 1979, when he was hired by BYU. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California-San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere (Finland) in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, Netherlands) in 2001. In 1999, he was awarded BYU's Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts distinction. Since then he has served as the president of the Utah Association of Scholars, as well as associate editor of the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics since 2003.

Skousen's work in linguistics has dealt chiefly with developing a theory of language called Analogical Modeling, a theory that predicts language behavior by means of examples rather than by rules. He has published three books on this subject: Analogical Modeling of Language (1989), Analogy and Structure (1992), and Analogical Modeling: An Exemplar-Based Approach to Language (2002). More recently, he has published on the quantum computation of Analogical Modeling, notably in his 2005 paper "Quantum Analogical Modeling" (available at www.arXiv.org). Skousen began working on the critical text of the Book of Mormon in 1988. This work represents the central task of the Critical Text Project, to restore by scholarly means the original text of the Book of Mormon, to the extent possible. To date, he has published 9 books on the subject, with 4 more to appear in the next three years. Altogether, up through 2013, he has given 94 presentations and written/published 14 books, 70 articles, and 23 online and media publications. He lives in Spanish Fork with his wife Sirkku and continues to teach and lecture.

Extent

4 cartons

68 folders

Language of Materials

English

Arrangement

Career and department files are roughly chronological by approximate starting year.

Course files are separated into groupings of English, English Language, Linguistics, and other; each class grouping is arranged in order of class number, then chronologically by semester (Winter, Spring, Summer, then Fall where applicable; different sections of the same class in the same semester and year are in numerical order where applicable), which is inferred if possible from content where no date is on the label. Where no dates are given, files are alphabetical by title or otherwise filed as logically as possible.

Student files are roughly chronological; where multiple papers are filed within the same year, they are arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.

Repository Details

Part of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Repository

Contact:
1130 HBLL
Brigham Young University
Provo Utah 84602 United States