Jan Koster (born 8 July 1945 in

Delft Delft () is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, and The Hague, to the northwest. Together with them, it is part of both the Rotterdam–The Hague metropolitan ...

) is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; nl, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, abbreviated as RUG) is a public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. Founded in 1614, the university is the ...

. Koster studied at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bein ...

, where, after being a visiting scientist at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976), he received his PhD in 1978. Before being appointed full professor and chair of the linguistics department at

Groningen Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...

(in 1985), Koster was assistant professor at the

and

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollm ...

, and associate professor at

Tilburg University Tilburg University is a public research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities, located in Tilburg in the southern part of the Netherlands. Tilburg University ha ...

. With

Henk van Riemsdijk Henk van Riemsdijk (born 27 April 1948 in The Hague, The Netherlands) is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University. Career Van Riemsdijk studied linguistics at the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis and at the Univers ...

and Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Koster was one of the founders of GLOW, the major European organization of

generative linguistics 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 ...

.Frederick J. Newmeyer, ''Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter-Century of Transformational Generative Grammar.'' New York tc. Academic Press, 1980. He was co-founder and editor of ''The Linguistic Review'' and was until his retirement co-editor (with van Riemsdijk and Harry van der Hulst) of ''Studies in Generative Grammar'' (published by Mouton de Gruyter). He specializes in theoretical syntax and the philosophy and history of linguistics. He made notable contributions to the theories of

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

, locality and anaphora.

Selected publications

*''Locality Principles in Syntax'' (1978). Dordrecht: Foris. *''Domains and Dynasties'' (1987). Dordrecht: Foris. *(With E. Reuland, Eds.) ''Long-Distance Anaphora'' (1991). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

External links

Home page Jan Koster (University of Groningen)
1945 births Living people Linguists from the Netherlands Syntacticians People from Delft University of Amsterdam alumni Tilburg University faculty University of Amsterdam faculty University of Groningen faculty Utrecht University faculty {{Netherlands-linguist-stub