David Michael Pesetsky (born 1957) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

. He is the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and former Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 ...

Education

He received a B.A. in linguistics from

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

in 1977 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the

in 1982.

Career

Pesetsky taught at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

and the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

before joining the faculty of MIT in 1988. Pesetsky was elected a

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS) is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected ...

in 2011, and a Fellow of 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'', ...

in 2013. He has published articles and books within the framework of

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...

. A specialist in

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

, he has published on the cross-linguistic properties of

wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

as well as the theory of

argument structure In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambigu ...

. In a collaboration with Esther Torrego, he developed a theory of

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In vari ...

noun phrases In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occ ...

, arguing that

nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...

and

accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

cases are the mirror image for the nominal system of phi feature agreement in the verbal system.Pesetsky, David and Esther Torrego (2001) "T-to-C: Causes and Consequences", in M. Kenstowicz (ed.) Ken Hale: A Life in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 355-426. He has worked extensively on the structure of Russian, and recently has argued (in collaboration with Jonah Katz) that the syntax of tonal music is identical to the structure of language.Pesetsky, David and Jonah Katz (2011)
The Identity Thesis for Language and Music
In an article coauthored with

Andrew Nevins Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in List of countries where English is an official language, English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is freq ...

and Cilene Rodrigues, Pesetsky criticized claims by

Daniel Everett Daniel Leonard Everett (born 26 July 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language. Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University i ...

concerning the

Pirahã language Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is the only surviving ...

, touching off a protracted debate in the pages of the journal ''Language''.Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues (2009).
Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment
, ''Language'', 85.2, 355–404.Daniel Everett (2009),
Pirahã Culture and Grammar: a Response to some criticism
", ''Language'', 85.2, 405–442.Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues (2009),
Evidence and Argumentation: a Reply to Everett (2009)
, ''Language'', 85.3, 671–681.

Notes

External links

Homepage
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pesetsky, David Living people Linguists from the United States Generative linguistics Syntacticians MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty 1957 births Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America