Charles Yang (born 1973) is a linguist and cognitive scientist. He is currently Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
. His research focuses on
language acquisition, variation and change, and is carried out from a broadly
Chomskyan perspective.
Yang is a graduate of
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
's
AI Lab. His first book, ''Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language'' (2002), proposes a model of syntactic acquisition couched within the
Principles and Parameters framework. In this model, different grammatical options are associated with different probabilities, which change over time. The model is applied to a number of case studies in language acquisition and
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
. His second book, ''The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World'' (2006), is written for a popular audience, and explores acquisition and knowledge of language. Yang's third book, ''The Price of Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language'' (2016), won the
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
's
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalis ...
Award. This book deals with the acquisition of linguistic rules with exceptions, and proposes a quantifiable upper bound on the number of lexical exceptions that a grammatical rule can tolerate.
In 2018, Yang was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
[.]
References
Books
* ''Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language'', London: Oxford University Press 2002
* ''The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World'', New York: Scribner's 2006
* ''The Price of Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2016
External links
Personal webpage
1973 births
Living people
21st-century linguists
Linguists from the United States
American cognitive scientists
MIT School of Engineering alumni
University of Pennsylvania faculty
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