John McCarthy (born 1953 in Medford, Massachusetts) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a speciality in phonology and morphology. He was educated at Harvard University and MIT and was responsible, along with Alan Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for John McCarthy. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_%28linguist%29