Jacob "Jack" Hoeksema (born 30 October 1956 in Groningen) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture with a specialities in semantics, morphology, and historical linguistics. His first degree was in Dutch literature and linguistics at the University of Groningen in 1981, and his PhD was completed at the same university in 1984 (with the dissertation Categorial Morphology).
Hoeksema has been instrumental in the study of negative polarity, and his work is part of the Dutch school of generalized quantifier theory. [1] He is especially known for applying results from the study of monotonicity to polarity phenomena, [2] and in criticizing too narrow construals of what counts as a polarity licensor. [3] He has also worked extensively on the historical development of various aspects of grammar, mostly from corpora of Dutch and English, including documenting the changes in polarity items and in quantifiers. [4]
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG.
Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that encompasses knowledge, belief, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals may, might, must. However, it occurs cross-linguistically, encoded in a wide variety of lexical items and grammatical structures. Epistemic modality has been studied from many perspectives within linguistics and philosophy. It is one of the most studied phenomena in formal semantics.
The linguistics wars were extended disputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement between Noam Chomsky and several of his associates and students. The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley —self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"—proposed an alternative approach in which the relation between semantics and syntax is viewed differently, which treated deep structures as meaning rather than syntactic objects. While Chomsky and other generative grammarians argued that meaning is driven by an underlying syntax, generative semanticists posited that syntax is shaped by an underlying meaning. This intellectual divergence led to two competing frameworks in generative semantics and interpretive semantics.
Laurence Robert Horn is an American linguist. He is professor emeritus of linguistics in the department of linguistics at Yale University with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. He received his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA and formerly served as director of undergraduate studies, director of graduate studies, and chair of Yale's department of linguistics. In 2021, he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
Anna Szabolcsi (//) is a linguist whose research has focused on semantics, syntax, and the syntax–semantics interface. She was born and educated in Hungary, and received her Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax, semantics (meaning), morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics. Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics and psycholinguistics bridge many of these divisions.
Frans Zwarts was the rector magnificus of the University of Groningen (2002–2011) and a linguist and professor in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture with a specialty in semantics. His first degree was in general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, and his PhD was completed at the University of Groningen in 1986 with the dissertation Categoriale grammatica en algebraïsche semantiek; een onderzoek naar negatie en polariteit in het Nederlands. He was appointed professor of Dutch linguistics in Groningen in 1987, and was scientific director of the research school (onderzoekschool) Behavioral & Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) from 1999 until 2002, when he was elected rector magnificus. He is the president of the National Dyslexia Commission and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Manfred Krifka is a German linguist. He was the director of the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics in Berlin, and professor of general linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was editor of the academic journal Linguistics and Philosophy from 1999 to 2023 and is editor of Theoretical Linguistics
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
In linguistics, veridicality is a semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.
Henriëtte Elisabeth de Swart is a Dutch linguist.
Cornelis Kees de Bot is a Dutch linguist. He is currently the chair of applied linguistics at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and at the University of Pannonia. He is known for his work on second language development and the use of dynamical systems theory to study second language development.
Wander Marius Lowie is a Dutch linguist. He is currently a professor of applied linguistics at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is known for his work on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory.
Anastasia Giannakidou is the Frank J. McLoraine Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is the founder and inaugural director of the Center for Hellenic Studies at the University of Chicago, and co-director of Center for Gesture, Sign and Language. She is best known for her work on veridicality, polarity phenomena, modal sentences, and the interactions of tense and modality. She holds a Research Associate position at Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, is a faculty fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and is an associate member of Bilingualism Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
In linguistics, a minimizer is a word or phrase that denotes a very small quantity which is used to reinforce negation. For example, red cent is a minimizer in the sentence "I'm not paying him a red cent".
Michael K. Brame was an American linguist. He served as a professor at the University of Washington and was the founding editor of the peer-reviewed research journal, Linguistic Analysis. Brame's work focused on the development of recursive categorical syntax, also referred to as algebraic syntax, which integrated principles from algebra and category theory to analyze sentence structure and linguistic relationships. His framework challenged conventional transformational grammar by advocating for a lexicon-centered approach and emphasizing the connections between words and phrases. Additionally, Brame collaborated with his wife on research investigating the identity of the author behind the name "William Shakespeare", resulting in several publications.