Joan Bresnan

Last updated
Joan Bresnan
Born (1945-08-22) August 22, 1945 (age 77)
Education
Occupations
  • Linguist
  • academic
  • professor
Known for Lexical functional grammar

Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. [1] She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar. [2]

Contents

Career and research

After graduating from Reed College in 1966 with a degree in philosophy, [1] Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [3] where she studied with Noam Chomsky. [4] In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and wh-movement constructions within transformational grammar, and she frequently took positions at odds with those espoused by Chomsky. [5] [6]

Her dissatisfaction with transformational grammar led her to collaborate with Kaplan on a new theoretical framework, lexical-functional grammar, or LFG. [7] A volume of papers written in the new framework and edited by Bresnan, entitled The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, appeared in 1982. [8] Since then, Bresnan's work has focused on LFG analyses of various phenomena, primarily in English, Bantu languages, and Australian languages. She has also worked on analyses in optimality theory, and has pursued statistical approaches to linguistics. She has a strong interest in linguistic typology, which has influenced the development of LFG. [9] Additional research interests of hers include dynamics of probabilistic grammar and empirical foundations of syntax. [10] In pursuit of the latter, she established Stanford's Spoken Syntax Lab. [11]

Honors

Joan Bresnan was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1975-6 and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1982-3.

She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1999. [12] She was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006. [13]

She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. [14]

She was honored in August 2005 with a festschrift entitled Architectures, Rules, and Preferences: A Festschrift for Joan Bresnan, published by CSLI Publications in December 2007. [15]

During periods in 2009-2012 she visited Freiburg for collaborative research as an External Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. She was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2012. [16] She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. [17]

In 2016, she was selected as the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award winner. [18]

In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [19]

Teaching

Bresnan has also taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a member of the faculty. [1]

Selected publications

Bresnan wrote an informal and somewhat humorous account of her career and works for her ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. [20]

As of December 16, 2018, Stanford lists forty-four books and papers that Bresnan has either authored or co-authored since 1996. [21] However, she has been publishing since well over a decade before that. An incomplete selection of her particularly influential works appears below. [11]

Related Research Articles

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In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones. The method is commonly associated with American linguist Noam Chomsky.

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In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Joan Bresnan: Current". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
  2. ↑ "Lexical Functional Grammar - Glottopedia". www.glottopedia.org. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  3. ↑ "Alumni and their Dissertations – MIT Linguistics". linguistics.mit.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  4. ↑ "Joan Bresnan: Current". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  5. ↑ "The "Chomsky Effect": Episodes in Academic Activism". www.mit.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  6. ↑ Flint, Antony (November 19, 1995). "Divided legacy Noam Chomsky's theory of linguistics revolutionized the field,..." Boston Globe. p. 25. Retrieved 4 August 2012.[ permanent dead link ]
  7. ↑ Asudeh, Ash; Toivonen, Ida (2009-12-17). Lexical-Functional Grammar. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199544004.013.0017.
  8. ↑ The Mental representation of grammatical relations . Bresnan, Joan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1982. ISBN   0262021587. OCLC   8494468.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ↑ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.se. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  10. ↑ "Joan Bresnan: Research". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-16.
  11. 1 2 "Prof. Dr. Joan Bresnan — Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies – FRIAS". www.frias.uni-freiburg.de. Retrieved 2018-12-16.
  12. ↑ "Presidents" . Retrieved January 25, 2015.
  13. ↑ "LSA Fellows By Name | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
  14. ↑ "Joan W. Bresnan". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
  15. ↑ Architectures, rules, and preferences : variations on themes by Joan W. Bresnan. Bresnan, Joan., Zaenen, Annie E. (Annie Else), 1941-. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications, Center for the Study of Language and Information. 2007. ISBN   9781575865607. OCLC   187417504.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  16. ↑ "Fellows". Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
  17. ↑ "British Academy Fellowship reaches 1,000 as 42 new UK Fellows are welcomed". 16 Jul 2015.
  18. ↑ "Joan Bresnan receives the 2016 ACL Life Time Achievement Award | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  19. ↑ http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2023-nas-election.html
  20. ↑ Bresnan, Joan (December 2016). "Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush". Computational Linguistics. 42 (4): 599–617. doi: 10.1162/COLI_a_00260 .
  21. ↑ "Joan Bresnan: Publications". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-16.
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