Wallace Chafe

He was a student of Bernard Bloch and Floyd Lounsbury at Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1958.

[3] He later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became professor emeritus at UCSB in 1991.

Chafe was a cognitivist; he considered semantics to be a basic component of language.

Together with Johanna Nichols, he edited a seminal volume on evidentiality in language in 1986.

While at UC Santa Barbara, he and his wife, linguist Marianne Mithun, established and directed The Wallace Chafe and Marianne Mithun Fund for Research on Understudied Languages.