Optimality Theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics
From Uni- to Bidirectional Optimization
Edited by Géraldine Legendre, Michael T. Putnam, Henriëtte de Swart, and Erin Zaroukian
Author Information
Edited by Géraldine Legendre, Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Michael T. Putnam, Associate Professor of German and Linguistics, Penn State University, Henriëtte de Swart, Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics, Utrecht University, and Erin Zaroukian, Human Research and Engineering Directorate, US Army Research Laboratory, Postdoctoral fellow
Géraldine Legendre is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She co-developed, with Paul Smolensky, the soft constraint-based precursor to Optimality Theory and has played a major role in the development of OT in syntax since the early 1990s, focussing particularly on comparative studies of phenomena in syntax and at the syntax-semantics interface and on the modelling of early child syntax and code-switching. She is co-author of The Harmonic Mind (with Paul Smolensky; MIT Press, 2006) and co-editor of Optimality-Theoretic Syntax (with Jane Grimshaw and Sten Vikner; MIT Press, 2001).
Michael T. Putnam is Associate Professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University. His work focuses on gaining a better understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty at the intersection of culture, grammar, and performance biases, and he has published widely on comparative Germanic linguistics, the morphosyntax-semantics interface, and bilingualism. He is the author of The Structural Design of Language (with Thomas S. Stroik; CUP, 2013) and editor of Studies on German-Language Islands (Benjamins, 2011).
Erin Zaroukian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Research and Engineering Directorate of the US Army Research Laboratory, where her primary research is in human-computer collaboration, including assessing the comprehension of controlled natural languages and establishing principles for their design and development. Her PhD work focused on formal semantics of approximation and hedging, which she continued, with an experimental focus, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, CNRS).
Henriëtte de Swart is Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics at Utrecht University. Her research is concerned with cross-linguistic variation at the syntax-semantics-pragmatic interface, looking specifically at tense and aspect, negation, indefinites, genericity, and bare nominals. Her publications include Introduction to Natural Language Semantics (University of Chicago Press, 1998), The Semantics of Incorporation (with Donka Farkas; CSLI, 2003), and Conflicts in Interpretation (with Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, and Irene Krämer; Equinox, 2010).
Contributors:
Geertje van Bergen, Radboud University Nijmegen
Joshua Bousquette, University of Georgia
Hans Broekhuis, Meertens Institute
Jennifer Culbertson, Johns Hopkins University and University of Edinburgh
Ben Frey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fabian Heck, Leipzig University
Petra Hendriks, University of Groningen
Jet Hoek, Utrecht University
Lotte Hogeweg, Radboud University Nijmegen
Helen de Hoop, Radboud University Nijmegen
Géraldine Legendre, Johns Hopkins University
Sander Lestrade, Radboud University Nijmegen
Gereon Müller, Leipzig University
† Daniel Nützel, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Marc van Oostendorp, Meertens Institute
Michael T. Putnam, Pennsylvania State University
Joseph Salmons, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Laura Catharine Smith, Brigham Young University
Paul Smolensky, Johns Hopkins University
Henriëtte de Swart, Utrecht University
Peter de Swart, Radboud University Nijmegen
Ralf Vogel, Bielefeld University
Ellen Woolford, University of Massachusetts
Erin Zaroukian, Human research and Engineering Directorate, US Army Research Laboratory
